Cooking Nihongo Style Part 2

So, another teacher that we work with invited us to come and cook with them. I personally like this trend. This time it was one of our favorite sensei, Noda sensei. He works at Ritto Chugako and sits across from our desk. He is an art teacher and seems to have things in common with both Dan and I.

We were invited to come over to his house for a gyoza making session, lunch and then out to the Kusatsu aquarium with his daughters. He said he would pick us up at our house at 11:00 by car.

Right at 11:00 our doorbell rang. We opened it to find not only Noda sensei and his two daughters, but also a friend of the girls. This meant I had to run back up stairs and grab another Michigan pencil and piece of candy, because instead of two nine and ten year old kids to impress, there were now three.

We left and went directly to Noda’s house in Kusatsu. It was in an area we had never been to(meaning it wasn’t right by the train station), and it seemed nicer then many neighborhoods that we had seen up until then. Not in a fancy money way, but more in a there are stores to walk to, friendly neighbors, etc. kind of way.

We went in, were offered slippers and coffee and a seat on the tatami, while Noda finished prepping for our class. The three girls, Nao and Natsuki, his daughters, and Yuka, the friend, came and sat with us. Yuka by the way was wearing a cast on her left arm because she broke it playing dodgeball. Natsuki was present for the breaking. We proceeded to drill them with half English and half Japanese questions that we had vocabulary for: What is your favorite color?, What animals do you like?, How old are you?, etc. They giggled and hid their faces and eventually started asking us similar questions.

Then the coffees were done and Noda announced that it was time to make gyoza. He had already mixed the ground pork/beef, onion, garlic, cabbage mixture. The girls, Dan, and I surrounded the mixture and began. The girls showed us how to dip the wrapper halfway in egg, add some meat mixture, and then fold and pinch the wrapper. After formed, we placed the dumplings on a floured plate. When we finished, Noda told me that we had made 90 gyoza.

To finish the gyoza we went back to the tatami room and sat on our knees around the low table with a big electric frying pan on it. We fried up the gyoza and feasted on them, curry and rice, and salad. The girls had heard that we liked curry and rice, so they had prepared it for us. After lunch, we were suckered into a few card games before we left for the aquarium. The kids were really nice, so we obliged and played speed and some Japanese version of memory.

We then headed out to the aquarium. It was a typical outing with kids. They seemed to want to go faster and pound on the fish tanks and be kids. Pounding on the fish tanks was not corrected like it would have been in an aquarium in the states. I tried for a second to suggest that they might be scaring the fish, but they didn’t seem to care. The aquarium was filled with fish and other life from the nearby Biwako(Lake Biwa). This is the reason for our Prefecture to be linked with Michigan as sister states. Lake Biwa is the largest lake in Japan, so naturally it would be paired with the Great Lakes State.

After we went through the aquarium, we walked out to the park by the lake and found that Yuka had packed a ball for the outing and wanted to play dodgeball. I thought this was funny, but half-heartedly played with them. I was the first out.

We headed back towards the Noda house, stopped for ice cream, and barely made it in time for Yuka to get picked up by her dad for juku. Juku is the out of school school that a lot of Japanese kids go to. I think that usually kids go after school in the evenings. This was a national holiday, thus no school today and she was still going to juku. I guess she should since her parents pay for it. After Yuka was off, Nao and Natsuki taught us how to make paper cranes and then Noda sensei took us home.