Sorry it’s taken so long for us to update! We’ve been up to quite a lot since we last bloged but I can’t be bothered to recap all of it so I’ll just pick out some exceptionally memorable events from the last week or so J
We had our official welcome party hosted by Kobe Gakuin last week which included a banquet of delicious food but it was rather embarrassing as we were hungry and tried our best to guzzle all the delicious food while still attempting to meet and converse with lots of our lovely fellow students. We also had to each formally introduce ourselves in front of staff, students, our host families and the university president which was a tad nerve wracking but I think we managed to keep it short and sweet. After a few hours of chatting (and eating of course) we’d managed to make a bunch of new friends and in the not too distant future we intend to get our karaoke on together J
On Saturday morning we went to the Akashi chat club welcome party which yet again consisted of chatting in with mostly OAPs and eating a delicious 6 course meal…very yummy indeed. Brief explanation may be necessary at this point; Akashi chat club is an English speaking chat club for Japanese Anglophones who every year invite the Leeds students studying at Kobe Gakuin to come to their monthly meetings and pay them for their “trouble”. Absolutely no skin of our nose whatsoever, so it’s most definitely a win-win situation! Everyone was incredibly friendly and eager to know all about us so it was very relaxing and welcoming. I think Akashi chat club meetings have already become a regular thing to look forward to.
After the Akashi meet we had planned to go to “Nada no Kenka Matsuri” with Kanazawa Sensei, basically a festival where massive palanquins smash together in order to please the gods… awesome idea all around. However, because it rained viciously and persistently all Friday the festival was postponed until Sunday. But sadly we already had plans so we couldn’t go. Instead, Kester went to celebrate his anniversary with Sophie in Osaka, while Hilary, Sam and I met up with Sam’s Japanese host dad and went to an izakaya for some food and drinks.
The izakaya itself was brilliant because it had hundreds of various frog merchandise including cuddly toys, tooth pick holders and plates. If you’re mad about frogs it’s most definitely the place to be.
We ended up eating course after course of freshly made traditional Japanese food, including a meal of pig’s ears. Despite our initial hesitation we ate those ears right up as we had no intention of being ungrateful gaijin. And personally I prefer pig’s ears to Sashimi… but that’s just cause I can’t stomach raw fish.
Also, we got conversing with the other customers in the Izakaya, one of which (an old man) told us “we had beautiful faces but bodies which resembled pigs”… lol. It was the weirdest and most amusing situation we’d experienced so far in Japan. Yet, rather refreshing as this old geezer clearly wasn’t abiding by the standard Japanese over politeness and fake compliments which are abundant in general conversation. Also he was clearly rather lacking in racial awareness as he said I looked Indian and went on to inquire where my bindi was.
Then he added he thought Sam was Russian or Scandinavian and finally guessed that Hilary was Egyptian… completely wrong all around. The only reply I could squeak out between our hysterical laughter was “My mum’s Welsh…”. In the end he bought us some Okonomiyaki, despite our protest “But you said we need to diet from now on?”
(Left hand side) "Throwing out the random racial insinuations" guy ¬¬
We’ve got quite a lot of fun stuff going on in the next few weeks so hopefully we’ll have another (hopefully) interesting update again soon!
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