Sugi! Sugi! Sugi!

A couple of weeks ago I attended an "International Festival" put on by the group that I take Japanese lessons from. It was pretty fun.

There was dancing.

Notice the giant flag on the right side. That guy just waved that flag around for about 40 minutes. One of my students was up there dancing. It was very exciting. The guy in black on the the stage kept yelling "Sugi! Sugi! Sugi! Dokko! Dokko!" I asked what it meant, Yuko told me it was just nonsensical words to make the crowd excited.


There were lots of posters about different countries.
Unfortunately, they were in Japanese. So, not so much fun for me.

In Japan, every single person knows how to make origami cranes. They put the cranes in chains and hang them to bring good luck to sick people.


That's about 1000 cranes on the table right there. Wow! All done in one afternoon as far as I can tell.


Here I am painting. What a beautiful profile I have.


Here are our finished paintings. Yuko was kind enough to help me and translate for me all afternoon. Mine says "hello mom" and Yuko's says "always thankful."


All of the above photos are from Yuko. Thanks to her for remembering to bring a camera.



Last night we went to an Okinawa restaurant for dinner. Apparently the Okinawa food is much different than other food in Japan.

Here is some "umi budo" or sea grapes. They were tasty.


Here are some faces!




Here are some so-so french fries. I had Akiyoshi french fries the night before so of course I was disappointed by these.


And here is the weird thing I ate. Deep fried pig ear. Yum!

Seriously, no taste to them. Just the deep fried taste. Not too bad. If someone wouldn't have told me they were pig ears I would have never known.

Okinawa food, or at least the kind I had, was no different tasting to me than other Japanese food. HOWEVER they had A&W root beer! That was delicious! Happy times.

Christmas parties

Well, it is Christmas time, or X-mas as it is ALWAYS written in Japan, and how most of my kids think Christmas is spelled.

So, first we had to decorate the school.





The kid's party was nice. Very calm compared to the Halloween party. Only had 6 kids at this party, four students and Kaori's nieces, as opposed to the Halloween party where we had 26 kids. Just hung out, played some games, did some origami and stickering, had some cake. It was nice.

We played reindeer toss. I was the reindeer, but Yuko volunteered to put on the hat so I could take a picture. It was fun.

Kaori's niece Mya was still staring at me.

But, she was also staring at other people!


Yay!


Giant faces!


Bear head sweatshirts!


Then we had our adult party at MoMoZo. It was also fun. We had more adults show up than kids this time. We had a keg in our room we had so many people drinking. Nice!



Notice the keg!
Yup, good times all around.