You Never Know What You're Gonna Get

You Never Know What You're Gonna Get
Surprise meat for lunch today, Come get it!

Sometimes its normal, sometimes its not. Life is like a box of chocolates. Just make sure its very sugary please.

As Forrest Gump says “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get”. However in my case I’d have to rephrase that for the box lunch at school “You never know what you’re going to get”. I prayed I wouldn’t eat anything too extreme like barnacles. Hard on the teeth, like the ultimate rock candy.
At each school a lunch (called kyushoku) is prepared for you each day. Usually it consisted of a soup (corn or enoki mushroom), a carbohydrate (like bread or rice) and a dessert (yoghurt or jello called zeri "ZEH RII"). It usually had one meat as a main that rotated. It was hit and miss with vegetables. At least no asparagus! Score. I think I'm still a kid at heart.
All the books that prepare the JET English Teachers say “While we can’t force you, we suggest you eat the school lunch provided. This gives you a chance to interact with teachers, students and eat some foods that are an important part of Japanese culture”. As far as I could recall, Japanese foods don't contain cat or dog meat so I thought I’d probably be OK.
After a while I started to recognize some lunch foods repeating. My least favorite was bread and a condiment package. The package was made so that if you push it together both sides would squirt out. The problem was it was jam in one package and a kind of mayonnaise ish butter in the other side. I hated it. I usually spent a few minutes trying to carefully squirt only the jam while the white sauce would spray me in the face or all over my desk. Oh the joy of eating at your own desk. On days when school lunch wasn’t available in the summer, we would bring our own lunches. My desk would get stained with sushi, soy sauce, pasta sauce. You name it I probably had streaks of it on my desk. A dog would have loved my desk. The ultimate rainbow of flavours and smells.
I don’t consider myself a big eater by any means, but by my third year I sat across from this gigantic Judo teacher. He probably weighed about 300 pounds approx 140 KG. He was one big dude! His friend which happened to be his size would later break my ribs in Judo by falling on me (let’s keep that for another blogpost). You are a jerk by the way if you are reading this.

The guy ate two of these a day. Talk about carbo loading.

Anyways, he always ate a lot for lunch as you can imagine. How else can you maintain that kind of weight. When I would looked around I’d see all the other teachers eat half as much as him. He’d always go back for second helpings of anything that was left. I even once saw him just eat the jam package without any bread. He just squeezed it into his mouth, gross! Jam mixing with that terrible white cream of mayo butter. It was obesity to the extreme.

He was a big boy. We should have eaten him instead of what we ate.

I usually got a big helping as well. I’m not sure if they thought I was a big eater (and weighed only 130 pounds) or if they thought I was supplementing my other meals by making my lunch my biggest meal since it was free. That part was somewhat true. Always trying to save money.
One time we had some sort of beef looking meat, kind of black. I asked what it was. “Kujira”, they answered. I thought haha funny, we are really going to eat whale for lunch. As if there is enough whale to supply every school in this prefecture with whale. That would be a lot of whale. Half the world’s oceans would be depleted of whale. Wait, that has already happened.
I sat down and started to eat. The beef tasted a bit off I thought. Its beefy but with a little bit more rubbery taste. I washed it down with some milk (probably not a good idea. That’s usually a recipe for diarrhea).
Afterwards I was on our Gaijin (Foreign) community forum that I saw that some people had written “Be careful with lunch today, its whale. Don’t eat it”. Oh crap, maybe it really was I thought. Maybe it wasn’t a joke? Come to think of it, I had never tasted beef so rubbery and the colour of the meat was kind of dark. I looked on the food calendar that was on the wall. Naturally there was a cute child’s drawn picture of a whale on that day. That’s nice, make the whale all cute then eat it. That’s like saying it's Easter and giving out eggs, oh and just so you know we ate the rabbit that made those chocolate goodies.
I ate crab brains a few times too. I thought it just happened to be crab that they had put back into the topshell. Later one of the teachers said to me “How’s the brain? Most foreigners that have been at the school don’t eat that”. Crap! I had been eating brain for two years.
Oh well, I hoped that motto “You are what you eat” might come true.
I hoped I hadn’t been eating any feces and didn’t know it.

Oh boy. No comment.

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Other funny stories from this blog 
http://memoirsgaijin.blogspot.ca/

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http://eyethroughtheglass.blogspot.ca/


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