Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Woops!

When I first came to Japan, my wife's family would often take us out to the local chinese restuarant. The place was and still is amazing, although it's not much to look at. It's more like a little hole in the wall with grease stained walls and windows, a sign of an authentic chinese restuarant in Japan. Anyway, my Japanese at the time was limited to simple one to two word phrases like "delicious" or "I want to go, eat,etc."
So, one day we were all in a cab trying to decide where to eat for the night and someone mentioned the restuarant. I thought this would be a great chance to show off my Japanese skills to the in-laws, so I said(or thought I said) "That's sounds great! That place has delicious food!" Unfortunately the name of the restuarant like a lot of Chinsese restuarants has the character for "unique" or "珍" as its first character which is pronounced as Chin and the second character is the repitition character "γ€…" and the third character is "εΊ—" or ten which means shop or restuarant. So the name of the restaurant is Chin-chin tei but if you drop the 'tei' part like I did that fateful night, it means penis. So, in a cab with my(at that time)future in-laws, wife, and a cab driver I said "I like c--k, it's delicious, I wanna eat it!" and if you think that's bad I thought they couldn't hear me the first time so I said it at least three or four times. Mari kept elbowing me harder and harder until finally she stepped on my foot and explained what I said in English. Everyone just turned bright red and stared at their shoes. I thought it was the funniest thing that ever happened and of course I was all alone in that opinion.

3 comments:

Melanie Gray Augustin said...

I just love that story! It's going to have to go into my book once I finish it....

Kelly said...

haha, that is sooo funny!! It reminds me of when i said i wanted to go to the ote-arai tomorrow instead of the otera... ;)
Great blog by the way! Mind if i link it to my blog http://kelchans-yume-hiroba.blogspot.com/ ?

Jason R. Taylor said...

Sure! I'll put a link here too.

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