I went to work yesterday and made my coworker, friend, scholar and gentleman Matt go to the Thai place we always go to next to the office for lunch. We both decided to branch out from pad Thai ... and so we both ended up ordering the exact same noodle bowl, down to the type of noodle (there were four choices). Great minds...
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It was Tom Yum flavour with the flat rice noodles I absolutely love (similar to ho fun in Hong Kong cuisine, I think, which I used to always get at the HK Diner in Edinburgh) and which you can hardly find in Japan for some reason. I was in a soup-noodle mood (yes, such moods exist, though usually to be found at the tail-end of a hangover of a Sunday afternoon) and so it really hit the spot.
I just went to buy some tea for my classmate and myself - a journey of approximately THREE MINUTES to the school conbini downstairs and across the way - and I came back to find this:
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That's right. Mosquito bite #1 of approximately eight billion to come this summer. HOW? How can it have bitten me on the hand in the space of thirty seconds of being outside without my noticing? Japanese mosquitoes (蚊, ka) are ninjas, my friends. And by the way, in Japanese we don't say "bitten" by a mosquito but "stabbed" - the same word you'd use in the sense of being stabbed with a knife - 刺される, sasareru.
Now I have to sit through fifth period Japanese economic theory (in Japanese, natch) with an ITCHY HAND. Can't actually think of anything more torturous at this given moment. Unless the class happened to be my Friday 9am one, where the admittedly rather young & relatively handsome but sharp-tongued and strict professor makes me do maths calculations by hand (in Japanese, ditto) which he assures us are related to economics in some way while I attempt to stay awake and count the minutes until it's over... (−＿−；)
It was Tom Yum flavour with the flat rice noodles I absolutely love (similar to ho fun in Hong Kong cuisine, I think, which I used to always get at the HK Diner in Edinburgh) and which you can hardly find in Japan for some reason. I was in a soup-noodle mood (yes, such moods exist, though usually to be found at the tail-end of a hangover of a Sunday afternoon) and so it really hit the spot.
I just went to buy some tea for my classmate and myself - a journey of approximately THREE MINUTES to the school conbini downstairs and across the way - and I came back to find this:
That's right. Mosquito bite #1 of approximately eight billion to come this summer. HOW? How can it have bitten me on the hand in the space of thirty seconds of being outside without my noticing? Japanese mosquitoes (蚊, ka) are ninjas, my friends. And by the way, in Japanese we don't say "bitten" by a mosquito but "stabbed" - the same word you'd use in the sense of being stabbed with a knife - 刺される, sasareru.
Now I have to sit through fifth period Japanese economic theory (in Japanese, natch) with an ITCHY HAND. Can't actually think of anything more torturous at this given moment. Unless the class happened to be my Friday 9am one, where the admittedly rather young & relatively handsome but sharp-tongued and strict professor makes me do maths calculations by hand (in Japanese, ditto) which he assures us are related to economics in some way while I attempt to stay awake and count the minutes until it's over... (−＿−；)