Let's Do the Mambo

Two Saturdays ago, I went with many good friends of mine to Oarai Aquarium (Oarai is an oceanside town about 40 minutes from Mito). It is a really awesome aquarium and I got to see many sea thingies that I didn't even know existed. I was especially interested in seeing the mambo fish - or as it is called in English, the Oceanic Sunfish. I wanted to see it so much because of something that happened while I was co-teaching one of my Jr. High classes a couple of months ago. (Keep in mind, you will probably not find this story as humorous as I do. I have told it to many people and nobody laughs but me.) In the class, I had to critique the students on short little English presentations that they gave. My biggest critique for the whole class was that they shouldn't mumble. When I told them this, many of them looked at me and laughed. I looked at my Japanese English teacher and she was trying to suppress her laughing. She didn't quite understand what I was trying to say either. Well, I explained to her what "mumble" meant, she understood, and then relayed it to the students in Japanese. Anyways, after class, I asked her why everybody laughed when I said "Don't mumble." The other Japanese English teacher that had been in the room tried to explain to me what everybody thought I had said. He said that 'mumble' sounded like 'mambo', a type of fish that most Japanese know about. I told him I had never heard about it and he started doing gestures of what the fish does (I guess he thought I would understand him after that). He puckered up his lips really big and started doing what looked like the Hawaiian dance, except to only one side. I still didn't understand, and eventually there were several teachers trying to explain what a mambo fish was through broken English and the very entertaining gestures. Eventually, they just looked up a picture on the Interenet and showed it to me, which was a lot more efficient, but not as humorous as their gesturing around the teacher's room.
So the students thought I was telling them "Don't mambo." When they hear 'mambo', they don't think of the Latin dance, they think of this cute little (actually, it's pretty big) fish. When I saw the tank of them, I was mesmerized for quite a long time. They are really cute, big, and slow. They just moved around the tank with the huge bulging eyes and puckered lips looking at you and they would often float sideways or almost upside down. And they look like huge, flat bullets with fins. They were so cute and definitely my favorite at the aquarium.