IN A NUTSHELL: Chocolate With Chopsticks
Pub Quiz! I went all the way down to Hiroshima to a gaijin-friendly
bar called Kembys for the Pub Quiz I was participating in, without knowing for sure what one was.
All I knew is that it was at a Pub, involved a Quiz, and was a fund-raiser for Habitat for Humanity.
My only similar experience was at a packed pub in New Zealand. There, every table got a piece of paper
with a list of ten questions on a topic. We'd answer, turn it in, tally up the points, then get a new
sheet of paper. All with nonstop beer and munchies. It was great! This was pretty similar, it turned out.
When I arrived, I found out that the entire place had been rented out just for us (I don't think
it is normally open Sunday afternoons) and I saw Carina and Kate (two Bihoku JETs) at the same table
so I sat down with them. A fair amount of people filtered in and by the end, probably close to 50 people
were there. Our table became our team and
we named ourselves "waku-waku" (which, according to one dictionary means "tremble" or "get excited"
though I thought it meant "lazing around".) Anyway, Wyoming John (aka the Terminator ALT) was one of the hosts.
All the teams got a bunch of blank sheets of paper. John read the questions over the microphone
(with multiple choice answers and a spunky Japanese translator) and we wrote down our responses.
I totally got the Beatles question wrong (why did I think The Gators? Who are The Gators? I'd never heard
of The Alleman's or something, which was the correct answer for The Beatles' original name)
but, in general, all team members pulled their weight. The British girls, especially. One round was
all Movies: you had to guess the movie from a picture. I probably should have done better in that, really.
The only one I knew that no one else seemed
to was Twilight Samurai. Oddly, I sucked at the geography questions, but I knew how many pints of
blood were in the human body, even if I was talked out of it by someone who rationally said "Well, if you give 10%,
you get a pint right, therefore..." We randomly guessed all the agricultural producers of various
foods like sugar, coffee, and rice correctly. We also guessed the 4 Middle Eastern countries
involved in the 6-day war. Okay they guessed, I just nodded and agreed (though I knew the
capitals, even if that was not what was needed.) It was a pretty long quiz with 60 questions and two written tests
total. I loved it, though! I love trivia.
My Chocolate Victory! In between rounds, they had activities to do while we
waited for the scores to be tallied. The first activity did not sit well with me at all, but luckily,
two other people on my team volunteered. It had one person sit on the other's lap with their hands behind them
as the other person unpeeled and fed an orange to them as fast as possible. Something about being forced to eat
something from someone else's hands bothered me a lot. Especially oranges which I don't like because of
all the little white strands everywhere. I was really worried all the activities would be like this,
but nope! The next activity was right up my alley! We had to put on gloves, unwrap a pair of chopsticks,
unwrap a Snickers bar, then eat the Snickers bar using only the chopsticks. What? Eat chocolate fast?
I can do that! We went in rounds due to space
reasons and, during the
first round, our team gathered strategy hints. Putting the whole thing in your mouth made it really hard to
chew, so we figured chewing and swallowing a little at a time was the way to go. So that's what I did!
For some reason, the Japanese girl couldn't get her chopsticks open quickly, so it was me versus Food Man who
used brutal force when it came to eating the bar. It was close for awhile and we were both chewing madly
(as they played some grooving music to chew to) but in the end, I opened a clean mouth first and won!
Woo hoo! Five points for my team! The third in-between-rounds activity was the easiest: feel inside a box
to figure out what was inside. We lost two key points because we answered 'lei' instead of 'garland' even
though they accepted 'tinsel' as an answer.
No Raffle Prize, Though After all was done and tallied, and all teams' scores were accounted
for, we won third place! What was the prize? Chocolate! Heehee. The team next to us boasted that they
would have won if it had not been for the Snickers and Oranges. Afterward, the organizer sold raffle tickets
and other things
like recipe books and a 'cookie jar' (a jar full of measured ingredients to make cookies with.) I bought a few
things. All for a good cause, you know. Cookies. And to top off the evening, I got a ride home! I didn't
have to take the bus. I saw Kate's apartment for the first time and learned of this crazy plan of Kate's and
Brian's to spend a year in
Taiwan and then a year travelling landward to Africa. Brave, brave, blond souls.
