Bring Your Own Lunch to School Day!

On Monday, at the largest JHS, every student, teacher, and faculty member had to bring their own lunches to school. This is a rare feat because school lunch is meticulously planned out months in advance (very systematic here, if you haven’t noticed). I had grand plans to make an American school lunch, but in the end, it wasn’t that grand. I thought it would be easy remembering what I ate in JHS, but I couldn’t. I did remember my usual high school lunch, but just the thought of bringing a pop to class would’ve gotten me fired (just a little exaggeration). What I did try to recreate was the image that Americans DON’T eat hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch everyday. By now I hope you are wondering what I made…here it is: a carton of apple juice, 100 calorie packs of Ritz crackers and Oreos (the Oreos got passed around), a PB&J sandwich on Japanese bread (the bread is sliced very thick, so I used a knife to cut it in half. Making the 1 slice of bread almost equivalent to 2 slices of American bread), a tangerine, and finally some carrots (the fact that I ate them raw and without a sauce, completely mind blowing! I had 25 students staring at me when I took my first bite. Talk about suspense). I wouldn’t say that I made an exciting lunch, but it was so much lighter and easier on my stomach, I hope there is another bring your own lunch day again soon.

Here is a thought for the day. For school lunch, we get milk cartons that are about 200 mL, or about 6-7 ounces. In America, I usually drank 1% milk. But school lunch milk: has 7.6 grams of fat (1% has 1 gram). That means I’m drinking heavy, heavy milk, and it sure does taste like it.

Today (Tuesday) was my last day at the largest JHS and after four days, I finally put up some Thanksgiving poster boards with interesting facts about Thanksgiving in America and Japan. To my family members who were at Thanksgiving in 2009, you will be admired by 400 eyes over the next 4 weeks before I take the Thanksgiving pictures down and exchange them with Christmas photos and stories.

And as the leaves are changing, the weather is slowly getting colder and colder. In the classroom today, it was between 55-59 degrees, burrr. It might be time to figure out the heater situation at home...