Burgers and NASA

Monday was another day off of school, this time for the autumn equinox. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, so I decided to try out Mos Burger, which is a Japanese organic burger chain. It was actually pretty good, if small, and the menu only had coca-cola in the order of soda, so I had iced oolong. I also didn’t see any ketchup. Well, I decided to take my burger to go and eat it outside at a table in front of Family Mart (a convenience store on the other side of the street from Doshisha). Well, I was just sitting there eating my burger with my massive headphones on, when a woman on a bike came up behind me and asked me suddenly what country I was from. When I told her I was from the US she asked me about whether I spoke Japanese, and whether I was able to call home. I told her ‘yes’ on both counts, and she proceeded to try to communicate with me. I really wasn’t understanding anything but ‘NASA’, so she went into the convenience store to talk to the people there about how to phrase her request. I was sitting there waiting for her to come back when I realized that she might just be crazy, but I didn’t want to just walk off. She came back with a piece of paper that said ‘Bring space food for NASA’ with ‘Early NASA space food bring safety’ crossed out above it. I took her meaning to be that she wanted to make sure that NASA remembered to bring enough food on its next shuttle mission, based on both phrases, but I’m still not entirely certain. She asked me to convey this to NASA the next time I called home, and gave me ¥1000 ($10ish) to cover the cost of the call. Basically, I was so bewildered that I took the money and promised to do as she asked, at which point she went away. If I’d been dealing with English I might have been able to handle the situation better, but as it was I didn’t know what else to do. I think that this was my first encounter while in Japan with a crazy person. I think that I’m going to try and find a charity that helps the mentally ill to donate the money to, since I clearly can’t spend it calling NASA. After this I went straight home. We had Chinese food delivered for dinner, and then my host sister and I watched Hey!Hey!Hey! ‘s big anniversary live show on TV, which basically had performances by every major popstar in Japan, and one random guy with a blonde afro called DJ Ozma, who sang while surrounded by guys in masks wearing speedos with large plastic spiders on the front. It was strange.
-When you are on headphones, unless you are in someone’s way, no sane person will talk to you. This isn’t really specific to Japan, though.
-When you get food delivered here it comes on real plates, which you then leave outside your front door when you are done.
-You can get away with a lot more on Japanese TV than on American.