A day of body parts

I don’t think I’ll ever trust a Japanese chicken restaurant ever again, but more on that in a minute.

First, I have put pictures from my weekend at Hakone up on Flickr for those non-facebook folks, so check them out! http://www.flickr.com/photos/chickenteriyakiboy. Next, this weekend is a long, four day version of the regular thing, so I'm hopefully doing a bunch of fun stuff, such as taking day-trips, etc. Look for pictures (there will hopefully be a bunch) and a new entry at some point during the weekend. Finally, I apologize for the lengthy entry, but trust me, you'll want to read it through.

So life has been pretty routine since Sunday. Monday was another Japanese lesson with the kiddies at school, which went fairly well, although at one point I was asked to help a kid analyze a Japanese poem, which was kind of hard considering I knew about three words in the poem and the rest were written in ye olde tyme language.

Classes are going alright. Marketing is a COMPLETE waste of time, but at least I’m doing well on all the quizzes and stuff. Asian Business, even though it is a 100-level course, is definitely turning out to be the most challenging of all my classes, probably because its run by the Dean of TUJ. He likes to shoot questions at people rapid fire about the reading and records if we are right or wrong as part of our “Participation Grade”. Scary. Midterms start next Friday for me. Crazy, huh?

Today was certainly the most exciting day of the week by FAR. As referred to in the title of this entry, today was a day of interesting experiences with various body parts. I went to the International School for the “Humanities” lesson I usually help out with, but got to the school and was informed that Humanities was not on the menu today. Instead, Fiona (the teacher) informed me that we were going to be dissecting pig’s brains with the kids and that they were all extremely excited/nervous/freaked out. I didn’t mention that I was sort of feeling the same way at that point. But I was a good sport and said I’d be more than happy to help out.

So we went to the science room and set up table and then Fiona nonchalantly asked me to “sort out the pigs brains into 8 trays for the children”. Wait, you mean handle them? Um, okay. I opened the fridge and low and behold, there they were in all their glory, just waiting to be cut up. Poor pigs. So I organized the brains and covered them with tissues, which I thought would be cool to build up the suspense for the kids even more when I snapped away the tissue like a magician and revealed the brain to all of them like it was a rabbit I pulled out of a hat.

So the kids ran in and were screaming and talking about eating brains and all of that sixth grade-type stuff, but finally settled down enough to learn about safety. One of the rules that Fiona mentioned was “Don’t eat any parts of the brain”. Good advice, though I do wondered how a medulla oblongata that had been soaked in formaldehyde would taste. I handed out the brains and was assigned to three groups of three kids (my “brain trust” HAHAHAH!). Oh! Before that, Fiona wanted the kids to break up into groups with people “they knew they could trust but didn’t know as friends” in order to encourage the kids to meet other people. Though that wasn’t funny in itself, this little boy named Julian walked over to Fiona and said, very seriously, “I don’t trust anyone, Fiona. No one,” like some kind of bad guy in a movie. It was cute.

So the brain mashing began, and there were various screams of “Eww” and “Cool” and “What’s that!?” as I walked from group to group. Some of the groups were really into it and cut the brain up into various pieces and commented how it looked like “chicken” or “marshmallows” or “cream cheese” or other assorted foods. I was trying to be as helpful as possible, including helping the kids think up the answer to the question “Describe the brain in 15 words” to which I offered such gems as “juicy”, “slimy”, and “cute”. They didn’t like “cute”. Overall it was really really fun and different and cool and soon enough it was time for the kids to dump the brain parts away ("BRAIN DRAIN" HAHAHAHA!) and head home.

But that was not the end of my day, oh no! After that, I went to Ginza, the super expensive shopping district in Tokyo, to walk around for a while and then grab dinner. The area was really really cool and upscale and expensive and just fun to be in, even though I felt quite out of place. I wandered into a department store which had a whole floor of chocolate vendors selling for Valentine’s Day (Note: In Japan, Valentine’s Day is when only the women give the men gifts, usually chocolate. The men return the favor on White Day, March 14^th by giving women marshmallows – weird, huh?) and proceeded to walk around several times gathering numerous free samples of chocolate. I should have gotten some disguises to fool the saleswomen.

So after that I wandered around for a bit, went into the Sony Building and played with really cool toys, and checked out some department stores. Soon, it was time for dinner. Little did I know the adventure that would ensue thereafter. Ginza has a famous strip of “Yakitori” restaurants under the train tracks, which are little pubs that serve chicken and other stuff like that for businessmen, etc. I decided to see indulge.

I went to a place recommended by my guide book, which was a tiny little place that was blasting David Bowie when I walked in. That's a good sign, I thought. I got an English menu (another good sign) and ordered the “Yakitori Set” which I thought was going to be just skewers of chicken meat, which is what I had gotten at other places. A little while later, the waitress brought me a plate with skewers of several different types of meat that I couldn’t identify, though I knew they all were not the chicken I was used to. But I was hungry, so I ate them anyways. I noticed near the end of my meal that the waitress and her colleague where laughing in the corner at me. Now I was worried. Was I doing something wrong? I called them over and asked what each type of meat was. “Chicken” she said and I replied that I knew that, but knew they all weren’t “regular meat”. She then brought over this little poster with a picture of my dish on it and kanji for each type of meat next to the corresponding picture. From what I gathered, one of the skewers was regular chicken, one was liver, one was kidney, one was these chicken meatball things, one was heart, and one was….something else I couldn’t understand. I was "semi-okay" with kidney and liver and "marginally okay" with heart, though I probably wouldn't eat it again. Then, I asked her what the "mystery meat" was and she kept on pointing down. Chicken stomach? I asked. No. Chicken intestine? No. She kept pointing down. Uh oh. I knew where this was going. I opened up my phone, started the dictionary, and typed in “penis”. I showed her the translated kanji and she said one word: “Hai”, nodded, and ran away laughing.

I had eaten chicken penis.

Good god.