Tuesday, November 03, 2009

cherry blossoms and melons

The other day I read an interesting article on the newspaper. A Japanese lawyer living in NY tried to explain why Japanese people loves to drink SAKE under cherry blossoms, but he said " it was really difficult. " He couldn't find a suitable word of HAKANAI in English, though he has worked as lawyer in NY for a long time. The word includes the meanings of momentary,short-lived etc.

According to a book, when Japanese people see cherry blossoms, they(we) see appreciate falling cherry blossoms, and other people see just bunch of cherry blossoms.

It is interesting to know the difference how people understand about a thing.

And , I'll introduce another topic, though it's a tiny thing.
The other day we (my husband, Lea and I) went out for dinner to a Japanese restaurant. They served 8 small plates at once, including "dessert".
The dessert was slices of melon.

Lea tried to eat the melon at first, so I said "Oh, no it's dessert".
Lea "Why? it's an appetizer."

And it recalled me of one thing, it's melon with fresh ham.
Do you remember that my younger daughter "can't " eat fruit so much, because of their acid. She can eat bananas, on the other hand my elder daughter loves fruit except bananas.
But when we went to a French restaurant, they served melon with fresh ham as a appetizer. My younger daughter could eat. Since then fresh ham is her favorite. On the other hand my elder daughter didn't like the combination, she prefers roast beef to fresh ham.

Anyway Lea kept the melon as dessert. And unfortunately she was too full to eat melon as dessert.

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