Receiving presents from students

A recent gift from a student inspired this post. I get all kinds of things from my students and this one made me laugh — freeze-dried space ice-cream from the NASA space centre in Florida.

“It looks cute but it doesn’t taste good,” warned my student.

One of the small pleasures of teaching Japanese adults is that they are very thoughtful to give me omiyage (it means souvenir but people mostly give food) after they return from a holiday, be it local or overseas.

Omiyage is such a huge part of Japanese culture that most train stations and airports hawk bite-sized Japanese sweets amid a plethora of “useless” tourist stuff. That would be a Tokyo Nugget by itself…

My first gift was a floral bookmark from a student I had two years ago. She went to an onsen in Hakone with her mother and got me this little gift. As I taught more and more students, I received gifts like pears, apples, chocolate, mochi (sticky rice flour desserts), lipstick, blusher, lip gloss, masks, Krispy Kreme donuts…

I felt grateful that they thought of me but I maintained (to myself) that if I gave omiyage to my students every time I went on a trip, I’d be constantly buying gifts and be flat broke.

Just before I left teaching in 2008, I had a slew of farewell gifts and one that stood out in my memory is a gorgeous crème cashmere scarf given to me by a student I was very fond of. She was genuinely sad that I couldn’t teach her anymore and I was touched by her generous gift.

Back to the space ice-cream: it felt like Styrofoam but it really tasted like chocolate ice-cream. No, it wasn’t cold at all. It was like noshing on a dry biscuit with chocolate flavour.

If you want to read more about teacher-and-student gift giving, there’s a lovely post at Blue Lotus’ blog.

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