Ohh Mondays...

School was, as per the usual, awesome yesterday. We have a new teacher who is there to support the Spanish and Portuguese speaking students & their parents (of which there are a handful at my schools). I got to speak some Spanish with her (albeit I am very rusty) which was really cool! Sometimes I feel like it's fate. I majored in Japanese - so I get to live & work in Japan. I minored in Spanish - I get to speak Spanish w/ some of my students & a coworker. How cool is that?! You're damn right it's cool!

So... I come home and I opened my fridge to find... basically nothing for dinner. So I decided to hit up Fressay - my local supermarket. As I was browsing the fish cases... I came across this.
鯨（くじら）= Whale.
Please note the little cartoon whale on the label.
So... I didn't really know what to do. I've never been very keen on the whole idea of killing whales, especially since they are so endangered. I knew that this happened in Japan... but it just never hit me until I saw the meat neatly packaged up with a shiso leaf in my grocery store fish aisle...
It made me kind of sad.
There is the added fact that the whole whaling industry that occurs in the waters surrounding Japan is controversial. Who knows what disputed waters that whale might have been swimming in? Poor guy. The political controversy just makes me feel even worse.
It's very similar to how I feel about eating Basashi (raw horsemeat). Sometimes Basashi will come from protected Mustangs who are caught in the United States, sold to the highest bidder, and slaughtered for thier meat. There was a protected species act for wild Mustangs in the U.S. that had been lifted (I'm not sure what its current status is) but people were violating it all the time with the sale of these poached horses. Whats worse is that people in Japan were willing to pay for the meat of these questionably acquired animals.
It isn't a question of what type of animal and whether or not it's cute and/or endagered, it's really the dirty politics behind getting the meat is that is upsetting to me.
So I came home sans whale meat (thank goodness) to another lovely surprise waiting for me in the bathroom:









Augh. This asshole (who unfortnately is NOT on the endangered species list) was just chilling out on my wall next to the toilet. We battled it out for a good ten minutes. I ended up squashing him and taking his paper-towel wrapped corpse out to the parking lot where it received another good squash. Just to be sure.
It scared the hell out of me when I went in the bathroom. I must have screamed bloody murder when I saw that two-inch cockroach relaxing on the wall. My neighbors must think I'm crazy.
Oh well. Maybe I am.