My friend’s family is having a Japanese exchange student over in a couple weeks. Since we are already here in Japan and she lives nearby, we decided to meet up. We met up for lunch and talked for a bit. Actually probably more then a fair bit as we left slightly hungry.

Later in the evening John Joe ran in telling us to come out quickly. Apparently as he was shopping for dinner he stumbled upon a local festival. Not wanting to waste this opportunity, we went.

We were kinda nervous as we were the only foreigners there and it was basically a neighborhood festival. Kinda like an over glorified block party at home. Our fears of shouts of “Dirty foreigners!” were unjustified though and the exact opposite occurred. They welcomed us in and had us join them in dance. An old lady gave us ice cream and at the end an old man offered us sake, japanese alcohol. And it most definitely was not cheap stuff… Must have been around 9000 yen or 90 U.S. dollars our roommate said. I tried a bit just to check it out. It is a little different from the little wine I have tried. Much stronger.

He invited us to come again tomorrow. Unfortunately I already have a prior commitment in visiting my family’s friend in Japan as I’d love to go. His openness is really cool though.

I’ll see about uploading my grainy pictures tomorrow (*sob* I still haven’t quite figured everything out with my camera yet. Time to do some indepth testing later) and perhaps a video or two of me and my pathetic attempts at joining in the dances if you are lucky. A couple dances I actually had down a bit and for my first time I think I did rather good. But it still looks rather sad. *smile*

» You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.