Five forks, five knives, two spoons, and pair of chopsticks

Well, it's about 12:30 AM here, and I wake up early in the morning, but after I go back to Tokyo tomorrow I will be without internet again, and today was just too amusing not to update about it.

We've been having all sorts of meetings with school executives here in Kumamoto, and tonight was kind of the culmination of it all. We arrived in a fancy hotel where we sat at a long table with the dean of Luther Gakuin (basically in charge of the junior high, high school and college), the vice-principal, the principal, the head of the office staff, another admin guy, two teachers, our Japanese program director from Tokyo and the four J3s who teach and Luther Gakuin. The table was set with all the utensils listed in the subject of this entry with the exception of the chopsticks, which several of us requested immediately because it was harder to eat without them. Really. I've been here too long already when I look at a dish and know that a fork and knife is just going to make it harder! ;)

We had to do formal introductions at dinner, but aside from that, it was good food and hard conversation. We had the three of us who are pretty much only English, and at least three admin people who are only Japanese. So, even with the bilinguals remembering to translate from time to time, at least a few of us were lost no matter which language we used. The highlight of the evening was when we found that we could have a common conversation by comparing animal sounds in Japanese verses English, at which point I started laughing pretty hard at the irony of us all decked out and saying things like "cock a doodle doo", which drew attention from the dean and then I had to try to explain why it was so funny. Luckily his English is extremely good.

Matt has been pushing for us to do Karaoke for quite some time (Karaoke is HUGE in Japan), and during his introduction he invited the table to Karaoke with him afterwards. Perhaps with the influence of the wine some of them were drinking during dinner, the group that ended up attending karaoke was Matt, Sarah, me, one of the older J3s, the dean, the vice principal, and our Japanese program director. The vice principal and the dean paid for pretty much everything too, including a round of drinks in karaoke (I had strawberry milk...yummy!, but I also got to taste someone else's plum wine, which was interesting, if a bit much for me). In addition to some Japanese songs, we sang Kokomo, Under the Sea, and I did "Copa de la Vida" for mine...not that I really like Ricky Martin, but I was craving Spanish. It was funny to see Japanese Administrative folks in suits singing along energetically with the "Go, go, go; ale, ale, ale!" (there should be an accent on the 'e's in 'ale', but I don't know how to add it).