Apropos of nothing #5: Airplane anecdote

I first came to Japan at the end of July, 2001. After our first JET Programme orientation in Chicago, we took off on an ANA jet out of O'Hare.

Also on this ANA flight was some church group out of Milwaukee. Most of them were teens, and they were wearing matching group t-shirts proudly emblazoned with a hand-drawn logo. "Manitou-something-or-other." (Manitou is probably the most over-used Native American word in non-Native-American context.) Anyway, I couldn't describe the group as a whole, but the two guys in the same row as us spent the first hour or so of the flight snarking about the JET Programme and us "losers in suits" who were in it. "Oh, I wanna be a JET toooooo..." was about the wittiest comment they made, but they were still being really annoying.

Finally the guy next to me turned to them and said, politely,

"So, you guys are from Wisconsin, right?"

"Uh, hey, yeah! We --"

"Fuckin' cheeseheads." And with that, he dropped the pretense of wanting to talk to them and turned back to continue our conversation.

This one still makes me laugh even now.

Apropos of nothing, first in a series

Apropos of Nothing: Random stories of little import that I find interesting/amusing.

On our travels around Kyushu, we (the JET gang) once visited a shop called Fukusaya, which specializes in "castella", a kind of sponge cake first brought to Japan by the Portugese way back when. (I think we were in Fukuoka at the time. Airport code for Fukuoka airport: FUK)

Fukusaya (福砂屋) was founded in 1624 in Nagasaki, and has been making castella ever since. They're probably the most famous makers of castella in the country. Naturally, we all bought some to bring back to our various offices/school boards/etc.

When I presented the staff at one of the schools I worked at with some castella, they were very impressed. One of the teachers asked the English teacher if I knew that Fukusaya was famous.

She said, "Of course not."

I fired back from across the room, "YES I DID," in passable Japanese.

I'm not sure, but I think that it was at this point that the rest of the staff began to have a higher opinion of me.

It's the little victories in life that make it worthwhile.