Tea For Free

It's said that growth or adventure requires being pushed out of the ordinary. This is usually true. However, the catalyst for my recent experience with Japanese hospitals came not through tragedy or a Herculean challenge but sheer stupidity. I was rushing to get ready [translation: cram] before class and thought that a kitchen knife would help me open up a grapefruit. When I opened my left thumb instead, my day's schedule came to a halt as I skipped class for the campus health center. The professional nurse there took one good look at the cut and told me to head for the local clinic.

I have no real complaints about the hospital. A fair number of the sicker patients were wearing cloth mouth masks, popular here to prevent or contain colds & allergies, and I thus felt more protected from disease than American lobbies, where some sick child is usually hacking up a storm. Though it did take them a while to call me in, the doctor was very nice and turned in a solid performance on fixing my 5-stitch-wide accident.

The one small scare was that he at first thought I might have nicked a nerve in the process, so he probed around a little first to make sure. I doubted it because I reasoned this would have caused insane pain, but was nonetheless relieved when he gave me an OK sign during the operation. It was a little weird, though, to hear him asking the nurse for a digital camera with which to offer me visual proof of my thin, white nerve's continued existence. A little gruesome to look at, but at least this pushed my appetite clock back by a comfortable 30 minutes or so and let me take care of one or two errands first.

Only one major cultural difference, and it is a huge plus in my little opinion: the automatic tea dispenser. Tea isn't just a drink here, but more like an expected social grace (or grease, without any gritty connotations) whenever a visitor drops by an institution, e.g. when I first dropped by orphanages or when I went with other exchange students on local school visits. Here's what the modest machine offers: plain water (top middle), oolong tea (bottom left), barley brew (bottom center) and green tea (bottom right). Each of these can be had hot or chilled, which is why there are two buttons per kind, but it being a rainy day I of course went for the throat-warming approach. This is another reason why the wait was no problem, as I sampled each of the varieties and confirmed a previously inexperienced preference for green.


Hope everyone is well over there and exercising proper kitchen caution. My thumb is well and offered no problems when I played bass guitar today at a music competition--but the write-up will have to come later. Sick people are allowed to get tired faster than normal, right? And no, I don't plan on attempting more shenanigans just to get a few warm cups on the house.