Welcome Party and More

October 29, 2014

                This past Friday, one of the schools that Adam works at threw him a welcome party.  It was conveniently located at a restaurant close to the Ogaki train station.  The food was really good.  We started off with three very little bowls filled respectively with spinach, octopus, and fish.  After this appetizer, they started the gas burner in the middle of the table with a wok filled with soup.  The soup had tofu, leaks, salmon (with the skin still on), other lettuce thing, and mushrooms.  They brought out a platter of sashimi (raw seafood).  Surprisingly, the thing that I liked the best out of the sashimi was the raw octopus.  I ate a piece of salmon and tuna, but it was tough getting that down.  They had different tempuras, salad, udon noodles, and ice cream puffs for dessert (I may be missing some things).  It was really good.  How it works is that they just have big dishes that everyone shares.  The school staff was so good to us.  Most of them know a little English and we had the English teachers there to help translate.  Everyone mingled from table to table, so everyone took a turn talking to us.  If they started talking in Japanese, someone would jump in and translate for us.  We felt very welcomed.

                On Saturday, we went to Ogaki again to shop and spent some time walking by the river.  This was the day where “people float down the river in a wash basin” as we were informed.  That’s really it.  They have one person with a long bamboo pole pushing and directing the wash basin down the river.  All the boats had traditional Japanese music playing in them too.  We had fun walking along and waving to everyone coming by. 

                Finally, I am beautiful.  Or, at least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.  In Canada, you don’t really go around telling people they’re beautiful.  But in Japan, maybe because of the language barrier, or culture, I keep hearing how beautiful I am.  Adam’s staff members tell him that his wife is beautiful.  People tell me directly.  When we get back to Canada, I’ll have such a wonderful self-esteem.  J I was also told that I look like a Japanese pop star.  Who knew?

                Today, Adam and I had the honour to judge the choral festival of the other junior high at which he works.  We took our job very seriously and were glad to do it as it meant that we got to sit on chairs, whereas the teachers and parents were standing (the school has 1000 students who took up the seats).  This time, every class sang a unique song, and only one song.  Again, it was very impressive.  As we both know very little about music and even less about Japanese music, we tried to make the difference between our scores small so that they didn’t influence the results too much.  Luckily, there were three other judges.  After it was done, the students all stood up and sang a song together.