No, that's not a slur. It's Naofumi-san's term for the pollen that has been assaulting most of my students for past few weeks. This week has seen a proliferation of face masks as people try to protect themselves from the onslaught. Success has been limited. It's been a miserable March for some of them.
As for myself, I'm relatively okay. Last week, I had a couple of sneezing days and even that wasn't so bad. I've never had a problem with allergies, but I was worried that strange Japanese pollen may trigger a sudden bout of hay fever. So far, so good. Hitomi-san has also been faring well, but apparently, her daughter is doing terribly. Given that she's the sickliest little kid I've known, that's not a surprise, unfortunately.
What else has been happening lately?
Benni-sensei, Hitomi-san, and I totally had steak for lunch today. Not just steak but filet mignon. To give a rough idea of how good this beef was, consider how exquisite a $40 filet must be. I'm 99.9% certain that it was the best beef I've ever had. I am unfond of this habit of dousing steak/non-bunned hamburg with unidentifiable house sauces, though. It's criminal to drown perfect meat like that. Especially when it's a sauce fraught with something as despicable as onions. Ew.
Next week, we're planning on going to a Korean barbecue place. It's become a weekly ritual with us. Last week, they finally took me to a kaiten-zushi restaurant, which features sushi on a conveyor belt holy crap how awesome is that? I admit, the merry-go-round sushi left a little to be desired - there's no way of telling exactly how long the sushi has been on the conveyor belt - but you can order fresh sushi too, so that makes up for it. I also had a bowl of chirashizushi (sushi scattered over rice). You can choose what you want, so I had raw tuna and avacado, and that was just plain delicious.
We've also been to a shabu shabu restaurant. This was interesting and entertaining, but it required a lot of time and a little energy. It's almost like fondue - you take the meat and "swish" it around a few times in a pot of boiling water to cook it. It cooks very quickly, but you can only do a little at a time, and with four people sharing one pot, it can get crowded. But it was fun and definitely yummy.
For more information on kaiten-zushi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conveyor_belt_sushi
For more information on shabu shabu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabu_shabu
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