Almost everyday, Aya brings something home from the daycare. Kids from her class always do – may it be colored illustrations, works of origami, or anything they picked up from the park like stones and stuffs. They call them omiyage, which means souvenir. They bring home their omiyage to show their parents like prized possessions.
When we picked up Aya from the daycare yesterday, she proudly held two plastics – one was holding a colored liquid (mizu iro = colored water), and the other a collection of cast-off skins of cicadas. She told us that they call them semi no nukegara in Japanese. Semi = cicada, nukegara = cast-off or shed skin
Cicadas? Eww.
There’s one subject in science that I kinda dislike, and that’s Biology. I hate tinkering around remains of things that used to be alive. I shudder at the sight of frogs and cats giving you a lifelike stare whilst swimming in formaldehyde. My cousin, when she was still a medical intern at a hospital, once showed me a picture of their class dissecting a human corpse on a table. The thought of dissecting a human made me sick. I swore that I’d never become a medical doctor, ever.
I digress.
Anyway, what amused me to no end was the fact that Aya would actually pick up a cicada’s skin, when she would jump up in fear of small insects that would occasionally visit us at home. Anyway, I jumped at the opportunity to explain to her that some insects shed off their old skins. It’s almost the same as changing old clothes as we humans do. But hey, I do know some people who would love to shed off their old skin in a heartbeat, given the possibility, haha. 😀
