Poo, chickens, blackboards and fush'n'chups - Sun 22 Apr

There was rodent poo on the bare slats of the bunk above me this morning, and on the floor. Weee're watching yoooou!

Proper yoga was on this morning, lovely.

I saw the new chickens. Yama chan gave a very entertaining impression of the sound that roosters make in English, "Cook-a-du-luu-luu-luu."


I vacuumed the restaurant, then got to enjoy picking flowers from the garden for the tables.


Cleaned windows, listened to Jason's Evolution 80s mix on my headphones and sang along. Yasuyo san, the head of staff, jokingly told me singing was banned, and asked if I'd like to go to karaoke.

My window washing was interrupted by an important request - to write up today's lunch menu on the blackboard and make it pretty. I drew the vista from the window of the restaurant :)


Delivered more pizzas to tables. These customers seemed less daunted.

Yasuyo san asked me to "clean the high places" - got to make use of a tall foreigner who takes other orders only with a lot of careful explaining while he lasts.

I did vegie prep in the kitchen for dinner. I peeled very reluctant skins from leek-like vegies with a less-than-effective peeler, and threw the skins in the vegie scraps bin. Yasuyo san then asked, "The skins? The skins?" It took me a while to get her meaning, as she's a woman of few words, but I can read facial expressions in any language, and knew I'd done something wrong. When the message was eventually transmitted, I retrieved and rinsed the skins for soup stock.

Yasuyo san lived in Sydney for years, and taught the girls in the kitchen the usage of an English word of the day, "Gorgeous." There was a big chorus of questioning "Goojesu" until the pronunciation evened out. I chimed in with some applications - your friend is gorgeous, that dress is gorgeous, you look gorgeous.

I can't have done too shabby a job of the lunch board, because I got dinner board duties as well. :) It was a rainy night.


Battle Against Japan's Low Things #17, a stainless steel corner on the range hood. I'd seen it earlier, but it's hard to keep everything juggling in there. It hurt less than my research had led me to expect.

Dinner for the workers included an "all you can drink" soup bar, because there was lots of different soups left over. I mentioned a craving for draught beer with the delicious dinner, and Yasuyo san offered my first small glass of draught for free*. It was lovely.
*Subsequent small glasses to be 200 yen.

At dinner, it was claimed by Yasuyo san that me not having a bath the previous day was the cause of the mouse appearing above my bed the previous night. This suggestion nearly caused soup to come out my nose.

Nobi entertained us, explaining that when she arrived in New Zealand, she thought, "What? What are they saying?? Is this the English I've been studying in Canada?" Yasuyo san said the first words spoken to her in Australia were, "Go to gate eight." Compare that to an English accent, and you'll understand why she had no idea what was going on either.

I explained the slight difference between Australian and New Zealand accents, resting arond the "i" sound, and the Australian tradition of rushing out the phrase, "Fush and chups," to every New Zealander encountered. Nobi laughed up a Japanese person trying to make the same fun of the accent, "Fashu ando chappsu." The image of a Japanese person trying earnestly to put on an insulting accent and rushing up to be rude to a New Zealander, and coming out with this, was too much, and I lost it. My inside-out manic laughter broke up the table. :D

After dinner, we made the left-over white rice into triangular onigiri (rice balls). Put in some filling, then push down the triangle, squeeze the sides, shift, repeat. Mine was a big of an ugly little sister.