Kate’s Quests

DJ and I went to a Christmas party Saturday night. Kayo (Rina’s mom) hosted it at her house and she had a bunch of friends over. Luckily almost all of them spoke English so they were very nice and kept a lot of the conversation in English for us. At one point they asked our ages and they thought I seemed about my age (27 next month) and they thought DJ was about 28. When he told them that he had actually turned 35 earlier this month, the place erupted. “Most Americans look much older than they are and much older than us Japanese, so for you to look so much younger…that is so amazing.” They just couldn’t get over it. DJ, of course, was LOVING it.

They asked us pretty amusing questions like, “I heard that people in America often put peanuts in Coca-Cola, is that true?” The answer was no…at least not to our knowledge. And my favorite, “Is it true that in some states it’s illegal to put a hole in a donut?” Again…not true. It boggles my mind that they would think that it would actually be illegal to put a hole in a donut, but ok.

We had a gift exchange and lucky us, ended up with more jam. We have enough jam to last us years because our families like to send jam for Christmas every year. We got to listen to Rina sing her song that she and I have been practicing for a few weeks now (from High School Musical 2, which she LOVES). And DJ got to play video games with the kids. And we had a blast doing that. They have a foot pad where you run as fast as you can and so does the character in the game or you have stand on the pad in order to balance on a motorcycle. We spent quite a while on that.

We brought them some wine with the imprint of Marilyn Monroe (made by Kestrel Winery in Washington State) on the bottle which they referred to as the ’sexy wine’ for the night. They seemed quite happy with the fact that we weren’t like the other military families they knew. We were interested in their culture and wanted to try the food and alcoholic beverages. We want to see Japan from the inside and not just look at it as an outsider would. It’s important to us to try everything and experience as much as we can during our time in Japan. The culture is so different and I know I wouldn’t get to experience half as much as I get to without help from Japanese friends.

I won’t be posting this next week, because I’ll be in Kyoto! But, I’ll be back soon and post a lot of pictures!