October 24, 2004 - Cultural Fair
	It's Sunday a.m. Tim and I are having some breakfast and listening to the rustle of chairs and tables outside in the parking area below our dorm. Today is the cultural fair for our dorm. People will be cooking dishes and doing dances from their home-countries. Tim and I could not quite figure out any American traditions that we would want to pass on, so we will just be lively guests at the fair. (I also offered to help with washing dishes!) When the Internet works in our room, we are able to broadcast KEXP (the Seattle Public Radio Station.) It is so nice to know what is going on in Ballard and Shilshole and Belltown, and all my favorite areas of town. I miss Seattle almost as much as I miss the people who live there.
October 24, 2004 - Winning a Host Family
	We met our host family yesterday. The room was packed with approximately 200 people. We listened to 1 full hour of Japanese language before a little old woman spoke a few sentences of English to address the students who don't speak Japanese. She said that the host-family program had recently won an award and gained non-profit status. She warned us to be good host-students as the host families are all volunteers. Then another woman said the same thing in Chinese. We were a bit scared about the whole thing! Fortunately, we were paired with an awesome family who has been hosting students for 19 years. They have a daughter who is 21. They are interested in community development and building history, so they gave us a tour around the area where the gathering was, then took us out for sushi at Sannomiya Station which is only one train stop from our house. It was a lot of fun. We are very lucky to have such a good host family, and we could tell that they enjoy doing it. It's probably a bit like having Bob and Kathy for a host family. They even told us to order any of the sushi listed on the wall (even though we could not read the names.) They had us write it down (for practice) and give it to the waiter. Yutaka-san (our host father) offered to eat any of it that we did not like. My favorite dish was a roll of nori seaweed, rice, shiso leaf and ume plum. Yummy and pretty. Tim ended up eating puffer fish testicles. We both passed on the puffer fish intestine contents, but shared a sort-of whiskey-type drink that had a puffer fish fin in it. The waitress showed us how to set it on fire before drinking it. The Yamashita family had never tried that before either. They seem adventurous.
October 24, 2004 - Karaoke
	Diana and I did our first karaoke party yesterday with some of my classmates. We rented this little karaoke room and sang to each other for two hours. It was surreal. I went in there thinking that I was only going to listen and ended up belting out a few songs, or tried to at any rate. My strategy was to stick to the songs that had a bit more of a chant line than a song line. The selection of songs I knew was limited so I had to dig pretty deep; David Lee Roth, "I'm just a Gigolo" The Doors, "People are Strange", The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction", Nirvana, "Where did you Sleep Last Night" and for my final performance, Peter Paul and Mary, "Puff the Magic Dragon". I am not a good singer. My new friends found the whole thing amusing and kept prodding me with the mike. I'm worried that the session may have been secretly recorded and I will soon be a unwilling internet hit; "Tall Gajin (foreigner) makes fool of himself at local Karaoke bar, click here to watch the locals suffer.
In other news- there was a rather large earthquake near Tokyo yesterday. We did not feel the earthquake here (we were quite far away from the epicenter - about 300-400 miles I think). Apparently it was pretty big but not too many people were hurt. I think the death toll is at 31, not great, but compared to the 6,000+ that died in the 1995 Kobe quake it seems lucky that so few died, especially given the proximity to Tokyo. Allot of people are displaced from their homes, maybe like 100,000 or so. This place has allot of earthquakes.
October 24, 2004 - After Karaoke
Karaoke was karaoke. Tim and I successfully made fools of ourselves in front of three of his classmates. Our scores (yes, we were scored competitively by a computer) were weak until we teamed up for a duet on the Doors' classic People are Strange. Things were looking up. My personal favorite. Lemon Tree by Peter, Paul and Mary. Afterwards, friends Ling and Tomo cooked up a 4-course spread at Ling's traditional style wood-built apartment. We sat on tatami mats at a table just 2' tall. Ling sent us home with a new rice cooker and a stern warning to watch out for wild boars on our way back to the station. Apparently, they are drawn to the sound of rustling plastic bags.

©2004    contact us