I'm getting caught up slowly...
First I need to mention Dekkan, who is this third-year IEC student who hangs out in the Ajisai room a lot. Jeff and I have talked to him several times in the last week or two. This last week on two different days we ran into him by the IEC table outside building 2 as we were heading back to the Ajisai room after lunch. He's pretty interesting, and he's easy to understand because he doesn't talk in the sloppy way most guys do, which usually makes them harder to understand than standard speech. I can't really tell if he's consciously speaking clearly or not, but either way, it's definitely a good thing if he wants to make friends with foreigners. Another good thing is that he always seems to be happy and smiling. Anyway, he's a fun person to be around.
So the point of all that was that since he's in IEC, he was at the party helping serve drinks and stuff, so we went over and talked to him for a bit there too. Since there wasn't very much food, and we were planning on going somewhere to eat anyway, we invited him along, but he said he probably couldn't come because he had to help clean up after the party. So, being nice people, we offered to help him clean up so he could leave sooner. Unfortunately, it worked out that the building it was in closed at 9pm (and the party lasted until about 8:30) so the people who were cleaning up were going to stay there all night. We couldn't do that, so we had to leave without him, but we gave him our cell phone information before we left.
Seven of us ended up leaving together with vague plans to find somewhere to eat in the area while heading toward the Mikage station, which was the closest to the party building. (That's on the Hankyuu line between Sannomiya and Okamoto.) It turned out that Danielle's host family manages (and thus lives right next to) a shrine in the Mikage area, so she was our leader, at least until we got to the station. Before that though, when we happened to be passing through the shrine area, she accidentally fell on some stairs because for her costume she was wearing a kimono, complete with split socks and wooden sandals. She didn't hurt herself, but she decided it would be better if she went and changed out of her outfit into normal clothes.
As a result, we all visited her home while she changed. We would have been fine waiting by the steps, but her host mother was nice and invited us in to wait. So I got to see the inside of another rather traditional Japanese house. Some time I'll have to go back to the area in daylight and take some pictures of the shrine, because from what I could see, it was a pretty nice shrine. The house was cool, too, what little I saw of it. The living room had a big table with a really interesting recessed seating area. What I mean by that is that it had seating around the table at normal floor level, but the area below the table was hollowed out so there was space for your legs like a bench. I don't think I've ever seen that before. The family had a cute little dog, too. I got the impression that her host family was a little bit impressed by our collective ability to use Japanese (which was concentrated mostly in Jeff and me, but whatever).
After we left the house, we headed toward the station, but we didn't see very much of anything that was both fairly cheap and still open that late. Aurelie, who apparently lives in that area too, thought she knew of an Italian place close by, but we couldn't find it. We must have wandered around for fifteen or twenty minutes after reaching the station, and asked two or three people, but we still couldn't find it. By that point, Jeff and I were starving and very much tired of wandering around, so we just left them. We had to go back to Sannomiya on the way home anyway, so we went to a meshiya (literally "meal shop" or something, but basically it serves similar dishes to what we can get at the Konan cafeteria at almost comparable prices) and then went home. We found out later that the rest of the group went to a Lawson's (convenience store) and got sandwiches or something.
So that was the rest of our night. We got home pretty late after the party, but Jeff's host mother didn't seem to be upset or anything, thankfully. We got to sleep in a bit the next morning, and then for lunch, they took us to this hotel right by Harborland. I guess she goes there fairly often to play tennis, since there's a health club and a restaurant within the hotel, so apparently they get lunch passes sometimes. This restaurant seems to just have a huge buffet with different dishes on different days, but there were a lot of different things to try, so it was a really good meal. There was spaghetti and udon and fish and omelets and cake and all sorts of things. We all probably ate too much, but in the afternoon, Jeff and I walked around Harborland for several hours, so I hope we walked most of it off. And his host mother played tennis for two hours, so I guess his host father was the only one that didn't seem to do much exercise that day after the meal. But he's pretty thin anyway, so it probably didn't matter too much.
Anyway, we went back to some of the same places we went last week, including the electronics store. Jeff bought some dvd-rws and a couple of playstation 2 games, and I bought another dirt-cheap Saturn game that I won't be able to play for months. Oh well. We also went looking for something to buy his host family because they were so nice with lunch and stuff, and also taking care of me for a week and a half. We didn't see anything at Harborland, so we wandered over to Motomachi and spent quite a while there. We finally decided that I would get some desserts somewhere, and Jeff would get a bottle of Kahlua (coffee liqueur that he likes diluted with milk). We went in a couple different shops but didn't see any for a good price. I did get some desserts at a shop near the station, but we hadn't gotten the Kahlua so we stopped at Myoudani to check the grocery store there. Luckily it had some for a decent price; mission accomplished. Both gifts seemed to be a success.
Sunday's adventures will be up as soon as I have enough time to write about them...