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Nar3: Japan

Dinner at Tohru's
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2003 at 8:19am by Brett.
(Friday, November 7th, 2003 at 10:19pm Japanese Standard Time)

I've been tutoring this man called Tohru in English for about a month. He invited me to his house for dinner tonight, and it was the most fun I've had in a long time.

He has two little children, a boy (7) and a girl (9). I get there, and his wife is picking up their daughter from her swimming lessons. She gets there, and introductions are done all around. The wife doesn't speak much English, and the children speak next to none.

They start setting up the table for the food, and the boy asks me to play with him, so I go into their tatami room where I see a SNES. Mmm. I am in my element. The boy pops in Mario All Stars and we start playing the original mario. For a little 7 year old boy, he was really good. The girl was really really shy and just watched TV, but the boy was anything but.

By the time the dinner was ready, he was sitting on my lap having me play his levels for him. Then dinner.

Oh the dinner.

Tohru didn't tell me that his wife is in culinary school. She had made SOOOO much food. I'm not going to have to eat for nearly a week. It was a traditional Japanese meal. I found nothing that I couldn't eat. There was only one thing that I wasn't terribly fond of. It was a type of daikon...I'm not a big fan of daikon anyway. Everything else, though was amazing.

Then after dinner, the girl came around a bit and was playing games with us. More Mario....I was THIS close to beating the game...Then we had dessert. It was sea foam cake, which was also amazing.

Tohru, his wife, and I sat and talked for a good while after dessert. It was a really odd mixture of Japanese and English. His wife spoke almost exclusively in Japanese, while Tohru spoke to me usually in English, but to everyone else in Japanese. I spoke the first thing that came to my mind...Usually it turned into broken Japanese with bits of English words said in a crippling Japanese accent.

When it was time for me to go, they called the kids together to say bye to me, and the boy started proper BAWLING. He started sobbing out bits of Japanese that I only partially understood. He was saying "I don't want him to leave!" and "I want him to play more games!" Kids give out love so freely...

So the kids came with Tohru and me back to campus. The little boy asked me to sing on the way back, so I blessed them with my rendition of "London Bridge", "Mary Had a Little Lamb", "Frere Jacque", "The Itsy Bitsy Spider", and the ABCs song. They were very impressed, and it made the little boy stop crying, so...

I was invited back sometime next month. I'm looking forward to then.