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Ghosts hate salt: who knew?
More cultural differences ahoy.
Monday evening I went from cheerfully diseased to morosely diseased as the sore throat + soar ears turned into a full out, achey body tired cold thingy, but with less stuffy nose and more searing throat pain. I didn't eat much at dinner and my family got worried.
The first thing they told me of course is that I should take a break from studying for my Japanese class, which I honestly would love. I take a certain pleasure in homework, I'll admit, but not this much of it. This much is just torturous. I do absolutely nothing the week long except go to school, use the internet for an hour, go home and study until bed time, interspersed by meals. Nothing else.
I gave my parents a call as I'd promised and they likewise told me that, (A) The grade I'll get in this program doesn't matter, neither to them nor to my transcript since U of C doesn't count it anyway. (B) I'm on summer vacation for goodness sake. A certain amount of vacating comes part and parcel. (C) Stop studying, go to bed, and take a break from school tomorrow. That's an order.
I was planning to go to school anyway, but the next morning I really did feel too sick to make it, so I asked my host parents to call in sick for me and slept till noon. I gradually started to feel better from there, up to feeling almost normal by the time my host mom returned from a parent teacher conference for her daughter around 3:30pm.
She made a snack for Kouichiro, my host brother, and I asked if I could have something to eat too. So she whipped out the cutting board and the vegetables and made me a soup from scratch. I was thinking more on the lines of, like, a piece of toast or something, but she was already cooking before I could protest that I didn't want to put her to any trouble.
As she cooked and I watched Kouichiro play with his food, she mentioned that today she was fairly busy. I immediately went into OMG PANIC mode and started apologizing for making so much trouble for her and worrying her and everything I could have possibly done to have made her day more stressful. See, the way I interepreted this was that she was subtly trying to tell me I was being a bit of a burden.
About half way through my apologies, she started plowing right over me and apologized to me for not being home and not taking care of me and being a bad host mother.
What what who now?
You're making me chicken soup from scratch just because I mentioned yesterday that that's what American culture dictates for sick people (she'd asked me what American mothers give their kids when they're sick) and you're calling yourself a bad host mother? So I switched tracks and praised her for everything she'd been doing and insisted that she was not a bad host mother and that I could sleep contendedly for a couple of hours while she went to a parent teacher's conference without any trouble.
Sheesh. "Bad host mother," you're making me chicken soup from scratch, o-kaasan. You're the most awesome host mother ever. The soup was delicious, by the way. A very Japanese take on chicken soup, but delicious.
I still feel like I was a real burden to my family yesterday, worrying them with what turned out to be nothing major. Earlier in the day I'd asked if she could take me to the doctor, because I wondered whether it was mono with how tired the illness seemed to be making me, and then I ended up feeling fine by the end of the day. I was embarrassed to have made them think it was anything more serious.
To mention a more obvious cultural difference, I was watching TV while my host mother was in the bath with the two kids and the doorbell rang. Of course, this being Japan, it wasn't just the doorbell, a little video screen lit up by the fax machine showing my host father standing at the door. Curious as to whether he'd locked himself out or something similar and further more curious why he hadn't been at dinner, I opened the door and said the traditional, "Welcome home."
My host father just stood there, in a dark suit and tie that he never wears, looking awkward. "Is... uh... is Mom there?" he asked.
I shook my head. "She's in the bath with the kids."
"Oh... oh. Umm. Well, you see, I... er... I can't come in."
"You can't come in?"
"Yeah... you see... I just came from a funeral for an old teacher and... umm..." at this point he looked very uncomfortable, "...if I come in, the ghosts will follow me, you see?"
"Oh. Right."
"And we don't want ghosts in the house. They'll make trouble."
"Of course."
"So, um... do you know where the salt is?"
"Yeah."
"Could you maybe bring it?"
I suppressed my laughter until I'd gotten well out of his presence and into the kitchen, where I chuckled a little silently. Okay, I admit it, I found the situation amusing, not only because of the somewhat surreal image of him poking his head through the door, using his body to block it I guess to make sure the ghosts couldn't get through, but also because he knew I'd think this was a little weird and he was adorably uncomfortable about it.
Shush, they get to have this sort of entertainment at my expense 24/7, allow me my moment.
Anyway, I returned with the salt, probably with the remnants of a smile on my face, and he sprinkled salt on both shoulders, then brushed them off.
"Ghosts hate salt, you see," he explained.
"Oh. Okay."
And now you know. And knowing's half the battle.