T-Day

Happy Thanksgiving, family and friends.

As you know, Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Blasphemy, right? Well, for those of us who live in a country with a Plymouth Rock (and perhaps a few too many field-trips to Plymouth Plantation, and by “too many,” I mean one), Thanksgiving is an integral part of our culture.

On Thanksgiving Night, which I shall now designate at T-Day, I got Seth, Melissa, Helen, and Nick to come to my place and make the trek to KFC, the closest thing we can get to a traditional Turkey Dinner. Funny thing about Japanese KFC, due to cultural differences, they don’t have mashed potatoes, nor do they sell huge buckets of chicken. A “Family Meal” is 6 pieces of chicken and 2 packets of fries. Yeah, I paid the price for it and was still hungry afterwards. KFC is apparently synonymous with Christmas in Japan, because they had a registration list, and the Colonel’s statue was bedecked with a red suit and plenty of Christmas cheer.

After making it back to my place, we opened our meals, and had a round of what we give thanks for. Then, it was time for Superbad. I love this movie, it makes me crack up every time I watch it. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it has a lot of rough language, and it’s based around very small grains of truth for males who have gone through the American public High School system. Poor Helen, our proper British/Kiwi friend, she had to preserve her image and blocked her head between her knees to stop the horrible sounds coming from my computer monitor.

So, that was last Thursday’s small Thanksgiving celebration.

We had a much more normal Thanksgiving at Weldon and Crystal’s (a married couple) on Saturday. They had all of the usual fixin’s- turkey, mashed potatoes (which yours truly made), cranberry sauce, etc. etc. We even played football in the schoolyard nearby.

My team, team Turkey Awesome, won the game! With 2 touchdowns, and a third on the way (until the security officer came by and kicked us out), we were clearly the victors.

Afterwards, we returned to their house and watched Starwars (Episode VI, aka the best one), played Jenga, Uno, poker, and the Midwesterners split up and played their alien “Euchre.” Yeah, I don’t know either, it has something to do with cards and being from a geographically unknown region. Yours truly won poker. After edging out the early Kiwi menace (Tina), kicking out the Kentucky Fried Southern leader (Eric), and surviving the great Singaporean drought (Natalie comes in and, in 1 hand, reduces all of our money at least by half), I made it out in the end with all of the money, $36 to be exact.

Sunday, I did a lot of nothing. Which is just what I needed after a busy day and week. I slept late, cleaned, ran some errands (which included filling up my precious kerosene, and getting a terrible haircut), and met up with Paul for dinner at Gusto.

This week, on Tuesday, after Japanese class was Matt’s birthday. Not only was it Matt’s birthday, but a new generation of game has been born. After assigning people around to me positions in my currently fictional, soon to be non-fictional, world takeover, I named someone the Pompadour of Pies. Well, this quickly turned into an all-night game, where each sentence had to have at least one word that started with the letter P. Yours truly was also the unofficial winner (even though this game has no “winners” per se) of this game. Perhaps, one my say that I was the paragon of pithy p-words, a prodigal player proliferate with positively perfect performance. Purple. I can’t wait for next week’s letter.

This week’s entry was brought to you by the Japanese word “marumarumaru.” Because nothing gets your Japanese teacher rubbing her upper chest (not oppai, get your mind out of the gutter) like the word “marumarumaru.”