One awesomely awesome student

This morning, maybe the best example of Japanese amazingness displayed itself.  First, I'll tell the story of my trip to school yesterday.

Since Take and I went out for sushi the night before, I did not have leftovers from supper to eat for lunch.  This means, I either stop at Lawson (convenience store) and get Onigiri (rice balls) or I buy a school lunch.  Since I was hungry for おにぎり(o-ni-gi-ri), I decided to go to Lawson and get a couple.  Since it is very close to school, there is almost always at least one student that I run into whenever I go to Lawson.

So I get to Lawson and they have a many choices for おにぎり, and of course there is something in the middle of the rice balls (either fish, vegetables, eggs, or meat) and since I can't read Kanji, I usually just pick a couple randomly and eat whatever is inside.  This has made for some interesting lunches in the past, but since a student was right next to the おにぎり I decided to strike up a conversation with her.  なんはおいしいですか？ (What is delicious?) I asked.  This is about the extent of my Japanese knowledge, so she replied with something I couldn't understand, so I just started pointing at random おにぎり and asking her if she liked them.  She ended up pointing to two of them, so I thanked her, bowed a few times, bought the おにぎり and was on my way to school.

Now flash forward to this morning.  I get to school and as soon as I take off my shoes, put my helmet in my locker, and look up, there is the student from Lawson yesterday, yelling "トーマス先生！”　(Tomasu-sensei), and running down the hall.  She gets to me and hands me a sheet of paper and says "read this please!"  It was handwritten in excellent penmanship and said:

You bought onigiri in convenience store.
I gave a proposal to you.
I feel uneasiness.
If you don't like sea tangle?
I would make the wrong advice.
I am sorry.

And then at the bottom was translations for all of the onigiri at Lawson!

Now I was shocked.  I guess one of the types of onigiri that i bought was sea tangle and she was very worried about me not liking it.  This poor girl took time out of her studying (big tests next monday tuesday wednesday, so students are at school until like 7:00pm studying) to write me this heartfelt note.  And she probably lost some sleep thinking to herself "oh I made that poor foreigner hate Japanese food forever."  And on top of it all, she went through the trouble of translating 11 different onigiri for me on the bottom of the letter.

All of those thoughts ran through my mind in 4 seconds as I was struggling to find the right words to say to her.  I pretty much just said "no no no, it was very delicious, thank you very much for helping me!" And she seemed relieved and bowed a lot and thanked me.  I don't know what she was thanking me for, maybe for enjoying the delicious food that she pointed out to me?  Either way, it was awesome.

In the interest of full disclosure, the other onigiri was some sort of fried pork shavings.  It was extremely delicious, and now, thanks to her translations, when you visit I will be able to pick out an onigiri that you will enjoy!

Also, one more thing to note: one of the onigiri is "dried bonito shavings."  I did not know that bonito was a type of fish.  For anyone that has ever taken spanish, they know it is a pretty fish, but not only is it a darn good-looking fish, it is also delicious when rice is wrapped around it.