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Tonight we had a Thanksgiving dinner for the Japanese students. I guess it's going to be my only Thanksgiving dinner, since I can't really afford to drive all the way home this year. Definitely the most interesting Thanksgiving dinner -- eating turkey off a styrofoam plate with chopsticks, surrounded by about a hundred Japanese people speaking a language I hardly understand.
Before the dinner, we did some Japanese stuff like calligraphy and origami. One of the girls that was showing me calligraphy won the "Emperor's award" for calligraphy. That pretty much means the Emperor of Japan thinks she is the best calligrapher in the whole country for her age. Pretty crazy. She made me some stuff. Here's one:
It means "number one in the world." Somehow that sounds so stereotypically Japanese. As a side note, one day, I want to open an American restaurant in Japan with a name like that... "Super American Happy Number One Restaurant!!!"
Some other pretty funny stuff happened. Like while we were eating dinner, this girl Yoshimi goes "AH! Keshi! You know Tokyo Disney World?"
"Yeah, I know it."
"You looka like Peter Pan from Tokyo Disney World!"
"...Thanks."
Amidst all the American people laughing at me, she passed around a digital camera with pictures of some guy in green tights at Disney, who looked nothing like me. He had red hair for cripes sake!
(In case you indie-fucks were wondering: Yoshimi had never heard the Flaming Lips song "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots." But I did let her listen to it on my iPod -- the English version and the Japanese version.)
Another funny thing is how excessively giddy those girls in the top picture were. Whenever anybody would do anything that even remotely warranted the slightest amount of praise, they would throw their hands up in the air and go "YYAAAAAYYYY!!!" This other guy and I figured this out pretty quickly, so whenever anything got too quiet or awkward or anything, we'd throw our hands up and go "YAAAYYY!" and a second later a whole chorus of Japanese girls was also yelling "YAAAAYYY!"
Also, the calligraphy girl's name (bottom left hand in the picture) was Mami. It's pronounced "Mommy." So I got to call someone Mommy all night, and be the only one who thought it was fucking hilarious.
Anyways. The past two days have been hilarious and awesome. If it's any indication how much fun Japan is going to be, I want to leave right now.
I'll leave you with two pictures. The first one is the ONLY candid photo anybody was able to take the entire time, with no peace signs present. I'm so serious. Whenever anybody would try to take their pictures they would drop whatever they were doing and do the peace thing with their hands.
And the last photo is super cute. It's of us doing calligraphy. "Mommy" is on the left. She wrote "Friends" in Japanese on the bottom of my polaroid in Japanese and English. Awwwwwww!
