The Shower Story

So, the shower story is an adventure in itself, separate from the saga of plumbing and heating in general. The shower story is among the many gems from my visit to my students' hometowns. It is also a shining example of the perils of having any expectations about anything, even something I've done before. I was expecting something like my previous shower experience from last summer, when all twenty of the girls on our team showered together twice a week. That had been something like a chore combined with a team-building routine and it took about a half hour or an hour. So if figured when my student informed me one day that we were going to the shower the next day, that I could imagine it taking up an hour or two of the schedule. So although I was right in my expectation of actually showering situation, particularly the level of privacy, I was dead wrong about the amount of time it would occupy. It didn't help that I was trying to coordinate meeting with the friend of another student who wanted to give me a gift.So some time after breakfast we went to the place that looked like a big hotel, except it was steamy hot. Every other building in that northern city was the same temperature inside and outside, since they have no heat. We turned in our shoes and they gave us shower shoes and keys for our locker. No surprises there. But they also gave us a key to a room. So we went up the stairs and my student said something like, “we have meal first.” which-like most things my students say to me-was both interesting and really strange since I made the mistake of applying my logic to it and wondering why we would eat a meal now that we were already at the shower place. But by now I should know better than to question anything so seemingly bizarre when my girls say them so matter-of-factly. I didn't say anything, I just followed the group up to the room, which had some beds and some lockers that didn't seem capable of locking. I thought maybe they were just giving us a nice place to put our clothes while we showered. Since I never really know what to expect, I have a tendency these days to sit around and wait for cues about what I'm supposed to do next. It's really hard to not look like an idiot while trying to figure what is appropriate or necessary. In the hotel room there was me, my student, her mom, her aunt, her sisters, her cousins and her gramma. So I'd never showered with a group like that before, but it promised to be interesting. Although it gets increasingly blurry to try to remember anything, I'm pretty sure I sat on the bed for a while before I had any clue what was next, I was silently wondering whether we were really going to eat or we were going to shower and how soon we would be out of there. And then my student said, “ok, we go have meal,” and with that we went off to a buffet on the third floor of the shower building. There was another time spent in limbo before we actually took our shower.As I expected, we got a locker to put our clothes in, and then together—me, my student and her mom, sisters, cousins, aunt and gramma—walked together in all our naked splendor to the showers. The most memorable part of the strip-down phase was when my student remarked, “you are so beautiful!” at the sight of my foreign skin, but since I'm used to these kinds of comments I didn't say anything, I just marched over to the showers.They're like pool showers and locker room showers. You just stand under a showerhead and do your stuff. I was just thrilled to take a shower at all since I'd been bouncing around the countryside for a week and had only been able to wash my feet and face every night. I was also really happy to be able to wash my hair while being warm, since I had washed it in a bucket outside on a farm two days before. And I was so glad that this shower could be long and thorough since my apartment's shower tends to run out of heat in a hurry. I was completely unfazed by the small matter of being in a shower with my student's family or that I was probably the only individual of my complexion they'd ever seen in person, let alone in a shower. I got over my fear of group showers last summer, and I took the presence of her relatives as kind of like being in the locker room at the Y. The only real surprise was when my student asked if I wanted to go in the steam room. This turned out to be the place where you ex foliate all your dead skin. Your get a little mitt similar to a scrubby sponge. My student insisted on scrubbing my back for me and she actually did a really good job. The towels we got to dry off with were something like a square foot in size, which dashed my dreams of wrapping up in one, but I got all dry and then got dressed and went upstairs to the room again to wait for the rest of the family to finish. I took the advice to sleep for a while in the bed, at least until my hair was dry. I assumed, wrongly, that we would just be there until we were dry and then take off. But as I was starting to figure out, taking a shower takes all day. I informed my other student's friend that I wasn't going to see him that day and gave up worrying about it. We sat around and watched T.V., which was immensely entertaining because I never watched T.V. here before I started visiting my students. Probably the best part was the music videos. My student said, “Look, teacher, this one is (you-know-who)” [if you don't know who that is, it doesn't actually matter. It's just the singer that all my students seem to adore.] The other girls did a lot of needlepoint. We talked a lot, we ate some of that salty fried food that comes in bags. All the English learners (I.e. My student and her cousin) got an opportunity to talk to me. At one point we went upstairs and played ping pong, until some creepy guys wanted to talk to me so we went downstairs and watched tv some more. We rounded the day out with dinner at the buffet and more TV. Then, all of a sudden my student said, “let's go.” and that was it. So there you go: the shower story.

The Granola Bars of Outstanding Logic AKA GraNunchuckola AKA Dragon Eye Lembas

WARNING: to get through this recipe, since I didn't measure anything, you need a pretty good sense of cooking and an even better sense of humor (or at least a high tolerance for the banter of a lunatic)

Prep times: Approximately two days, depending on desired level of insanity

Cook time: I dunno, like an hour?

Note: many members of my team have turned to granola as a great comfort food because its ingredients are easily acquired with honey being the only expensive one, and it can be made in spite of the total lack of ovens. Although about two of us have the cookbook with the correct formula for granola, I glanced at it briefly before embarking on this effort deciding to disregard the recommended proportion of honey to everything else.

Ingredients:

2 partially filled bags of oats. Probably something like 6 cups.

Approximately a crap load of honey. Like 12...somethings. In other words, most of a jar.

Like, some raisins. Like a bag.

A big bag of dried dragon eyes, still in their little shells

A bigger bag of walnuts all with the shells and about half of which are probably rotten. (The fun is finding out which ones)

uh, soynuts (I forgot to put them in, but it might be a good idea)

cinnamon, according to good judgement

little bit of oil. I used the fishy kind and no one can tell.

1. Preheat oven to: sike! There's no ovens here. Don't even plug the toaster oven in. It's gonna be a while. Plug in the water boiler instead and drink a crapload of tea because it's gonna be a long day.

2. Break the dragon eyes. That requires smashing the little shells, taking the raisin part out and removing the seed. It will take several hours, so take a break halfway through. Also, for true authenticity, do it all while listening to really random music, especially this country's version of r&b, which is soothing. Especially especially, you-know-who, beloved of a surprising number of my students. Also make sure than in acquiring a saddeningly small pile of usable dried fruit from a huge bag of dragon eyes, the kitchen is thoroughly and unabridgedly trashed, (I.e. The shell fragments must be on the counter and floor, the seeds must end up in at least ten inexplicable locations and every surface touched needs a smattering of stickiness.

3. Clean the kitchen and put everything away. Come back the next day and finish the job.

4. Break all the walnuts. For absolute authenticity, do not consult any natives on how to do it correctly. Correct is not authentic, or fun for that matter. It must also be done without a real nutcracker, since they don't have them here. So start by smashing them in can openers. When that gets old, which doesn't take long, cast about for some other methods. When brilliance strikes, and for perfect authenticity, use nunchucks, and feel real bad doing it. When fear of making too much noise or otherwise offending the dead becomes too much, finally resort to using a knife. Just slide it into the soft part at the back of the shell. It's not any faster that way, though.

5. While in the midst of breaking the nuts, take a break and toast the oats. Distribute the oats into three fairly ghetto bowls and dollop in some of the honey, but not all of it. Mix it all up and put in three different greased cooking pans. Toast on some reasonable setting until kind of toasted. Stir occassionally.

6. Put everything together, the nuts, the raisins and dragon eyes, the cinnamon. That's it? Wow. Add all the rest of the honey. Mix it all up and toast in shifts. It will be really gushy. The longer it goes, the more it will be dry. On one end of the continuum is like baklava. On the other end is nature valley (you know the really crunchy ones?

7. Finally, cram all of the granola into a container about half the appropriate size for such a volume of normal granola. The tighter it's packed, the crunchier and more qualified as lembas.

8. After a couple of hours, it will become a solid mass the shape of the container. So cut it up with a knife and it's done.