Nicotine

A few weeks ago, I met a guy named Kazuya in a cafe who told me about some drop-in Japanese classes that he teaches as a volunteer in a suburb up north. So today, I gave him a call and got directions to the class. I was feeling a little drowsy when I was on my way to the train, so I decided to stop for an energy drink.

In every convenience store, there's a large rack of energy drinks and jellies. I thought I'd try one of the brightly colored jellies that comes in a foil pack. I scanned the ingredients a bit quickly, but I saw that there was some caffeine and a bunch of vitamins in one of the orange ones, so I figured I give it a try. On the short train ride up, I started to feel a bit funny, so I took another look at the ingredients. Somehow, I had failed to notice that there was a big whack of nikachin (ニカチン) in the drink. As I haven't had a cigarette, or presumably any other nicotine, in over seven years, you can only imagine the effect. Luck ally, it wore off pretty quick.

The class was in the Bible Gospel Church. There were actually a bunch of different classes for people learning both Japanese and English. I was in the beginners group, which was taught by a woman named Yoshimura, who had studied English at UBC for 8 months. One of the two other students had done his undergrad at SFU. The class was all in Japanese and on some grammar I hadn't seen before, but I still learned a lot.

It's still hot enough in Osaka for a daily ice cream, but most of the stuff here is the soft kind. The best I've found is all imported. These are the biggest Häagen-Dazs containers they sell at my local supermarket.