Wa pao la

That is what I said after eating... Shabu-Shabu! :-)

Anyways, almost the usual Saturday except I got up really, really late.  But I was able to finish my laundry and hang them up for drying.  Then lunch, the last of my cooked meals for the week, nilagang baboy.  Then I went straight to the "regular" Saturday seminar, by bicycle of course, because it is not so easy to walk just yet.  My ankle feels much better though, thanks to the good, long sleep I enjoyed last night.  Thank you, Lord!  I think what happened was I tied my shoes too tight after the injury, and that may have caused the pain.  I didn't notice any significant swelling so maybe it wasn't a sprain?  Yikes!  Well, I don't know.  Today it feels like there's a very minor sprain somewhere inside.  As mentioned I still can't walk straight, but I can walk now.  And even do brisk walking.  But riding the bicycle is not a problem at all.  Plus it's just two minutes to get to school by bike then the short walk from the bicycle parking area to the seminar room (or to the office), compared to a 5 minute walk, completely on foot.

Anyways, after the seminar, went back to the office, did a little teeny beany bit of work, while Skyping with Mara. :-)  And then off to Hon-Atsugi we went!  By bicycle!  As I've mentioned before, it's about a 30-minute bicycle ride, but it's not so boring because there's two of us on this trip so we could chat a little bit.  At the restaurant, called "Nabezo," our two more senior colleagues who got there by bus were just waiting for us.  So there was 4 of us at Nabezo.  Then we started ordering, and the food started coming!

Because one of our colleagues didn't eat pork, and there was no seafood or chicken on the menu, we only had beef as meat.  Tofu was another source of protein, but mostly it was veggies, veggies, veggies.  Did I mention this is tabehodai, i.e. eat-all-you-can?

So there was me, the Filipino, and I was with one Japanese researcher, and two Chinese.  We learned how to say "I'm full" in our respective languages.  So I taught them "busog ako" or "ako ay busog."  And I learned...

Wa pao la.
Wa chan la.
Wa chans la.


Respectively, those are Chinese (Mandarin) sentences for:

I'm full.
I'm more than full.
I'm practically dead because I ate too much.

Actually at one point I thought I was like, wa chan la.  But after some time, I became just wa pao la.  The trouble though was, we had a 30-minute (or so) bike ride ahead of us.  Uphill.  Well, it wasn't a problem.  We were very happy about the food, though my Chinese colleague said that this time he did not eat that much because if he did, he would find it difficult to sleep early enough.  It is summer, though.  The temperature was not so bad as it was already around 8pm, but it is still summer.  Humidity!  And the daytime high was 34 degrees.  I was like soaking wet when I got to the office.  But it was all still worth it.  I like trying new food and new places, and interacting in such an international setting, sharing stories, words/sentences, and so on from each other's hometowns.

By the way, so while I saved 520 yen for a roundtrip bus fare to and from Hon-Atsugi for this Shabu-Shabu escapade, the Shabu-Shabu price itself was... 2000 yen.  It is a little bit expensive, but for an all-beef meatfest, which they say is all-Australian beef, I think it's still not bad.