Flashes of Panic

I talk about track in too many other places; all I have left to talk about here is food and sleep. And I’d rather not complain about sleep just yet.

Food, then: before returning to the stadium for the evening session, I joined two other reporters staying in my hotel at a ramen joint near the stadium. This is not ramen from a block or a styrofoam cup as we know it in the U.S.; this is the Japanese version of Chinese food, you’re supposed to make slurping noises, and it came with a plate of pork-fried rice which was as stellar as the soup itself. As long as I have time to find places to eat, I will not go hungry here.

The comic part was ordering. One of the guys I was with thought he could keep talking to the house mama-san as though she understood his English; she clearly understood not a word, but he kept trying. The menu had no pictures (unless you count the Japanese ideograms as pictures) so eventually we all trooped out to the front to point at the display case of plastic dishes in the front. Yes, that, and some of that.

Also, no chairs here. We sat at a low table placed on a raised platform; we shucked our shoes before climbing on to cushions on the platform and stuck our feet under the table, or sat cross-legged.

I’m sure Mama-san found us hugely amusing even though we were mutually unintelligible (gestures sometimes worked) and she spoke as enthusiastically to us in Japanese as we tried to speak to her in English. She brought us glasses of iced coffee after our dinner, and I drank two, because one of our threesome is not a coffee-drinker.

Of course, I’m not a coffee-drinker either, but I only had four hours of sleep last night, and I missed my nap this afternoon. So maybe I’m finally becoming one.