Formal Dinner

9th February, 2007

We were invited to a formal welcome dinner with Mr Iizuka and all the principals of the schools. Being a formal, Marie and I couldn’t resist buying new formal dresses. They were actually really beautiful dresses – Marie bought a red one and I bought a black and white one. Both were long of course. We dolled ourselves up and off we went to the formal. Food and drink were all catered for. It was pretty funny though because all the principals were on one side of the room and all the Aussies and Americans were on the other side. As people ate and drank through the night the groups began to slowly mingle. It was difficult to speak to the Principals though as many of them had limited English.






Dinner was a big buffet with lots of different Japanese style food. I didn’t know what a lot of it was but I think I pretty much gave everything a go – come on how could I resist! There was not a lot of choice with drinks – it was either Sake (Japanese wine), Asahi (beer) or orange juice. Well out of those choices I decided to stick with the beer even though I am not a beer drinker at all. I did try a bit of the Sake but I just can’t seem to get into it.



We all had to do an introduction speech again. It is becoming a bit of a habit now that when we go somewhere we have to introduce ourselves. I am getting very used to standing up on stage and talking in front of large crowds in Japanese.

After all of the introductions it was time to do our performance. Luckily we had prepared a few acts……
We read a poem called ‘8 Little Aussies’ which we made up,
then we played heads and tails (they loved that game by the way), then we danced to the ‘Time Warp’, then some Americans sang a Japanese song and then a couple of Americans acted out a Sumo scene. It was a pretty good performance and the Principals seemed to really enjoy it. I can’t believe that we actually had to perform!




The formal was from 6pm-8pm. It is funny here because they really seem to stick to time limits. At exactly 8pm everyone left. Well it seemed like a waste for us to be all dolled up and to go home at 8pm on a Friday night so we went to a pub. We were slightly overdressed for the occasion but oh well. We ended up going home at around 12 which was early, but we had to catch an 8am bus the following morning to go to Hiroshima.