Apartment Party!

My apartment building is split into two sections of four apartments each and all of the tenants are employed at the various schools in the area.  In my section there is a married couple (the wife, Natsu, works at one of my elementary schools and the husband, Ryo, at one of Anne's), an elementary school principal (Mori-san, also from one of Anne's schools), and Tanaka-san (from one of my elementary schools).  I'm not exactly sure how it started but I think it was the principal who came up with the idea of having a small dinner party so that we could get to know each other better (and I think he also wanted to practice his English).  So it was decided that Natsu would do the cooking and the party itself would be held in Mori-san's apartment.

Maybe it's because we're girls, but Ryo-sensei asked Anne and me to help out his wife with the cooking too.  I've gotta say, Japanese women are pretty amazing when it comes to cooking.  Keep in mind that a typical Japanese kitchen contains neither an oven nor a dishwasher.  Natsu was able to cook chicken, quiche, and ratatouille (<- thank you Pixar for teaching me to spell this) using only a small toaster-oven, two gas burners, and a fish grill.  In fact, most women in Japan are expected to cook a fresh dinner every evening even if they work during the day as well (they're not big into leftovers like we are in America).  Natsu's family actually owns a restaurant in Kesennuma and she said that she really enjoys cooking (as you can imagine, her dishes were delicious).  Anne and I had a good time hanging out with Natsu before the dinner-party started.  We helped out by making some rice balls and sticking toothpicks into some side-dishes - nothing too complicated (luckily).

The party itself was entertaining.  It started around 7:20 and didn't end until 11:30 even though it was a school night!  It turned out that Mori-san had quite the collection of bourbon which Anne was impressed to see since she used to live close to Bourbon county in the US.  There was plenty of beer, sake, and wine to go around (plus calpis soda for me).  We had several interesting conversations over the course of the evening and I was pleased to find that for most of the purely Japanese ones I was able to mostly follow what was being said (toward the end it got more difficult as I got more tired though).  Ryo speaks English well (and apparently can speak German really well) while Mori-san's English was so-so (he said he used to speak it better when he was younger but he's forgotten a lot of the vocabulary over the years).  For a while we spoke about the differences between different languages and how going from Japanese to English is very difficult because Japanese doesn't have some of the sounds that English does (like "l", "v", or even to an extent "w").  Ryo-sensei said that for him going from Japanese to German was easier since there weren't as many new sounds to learn.  He lived in Germany for a while but he noticed that many foreigners in Germany tended to speak English over German so he thought speaking English would be a good thing to learn too.

We talked for a while about how English is a global language but can be very different depending on the region.  I mentioned that my elementary students call the last letter of the alphabet "zed" (instead of "zee" like in the US) since a previous ALT had taught them that way.  Anne and I showed off our language skills a bit by saying the alphabets in French and Spanish, respectively.  We also mentioned that in the US the accents can be quite different depending on the region (we specifically talked about southern accents).  Ryo said that he had once tried to read Tom Sawyer but he found it too difficult to get past the dialogue between the characters.  When he first encountered the word "ain't" and tried to look it up in the dictionary he couldn't find it (of course).  So, even though he still has the book he has never been able to read the whole thing.  Anne and I said that if he had questions about it then we could try to help him out.

Anyway, when the teachers found out that my brother is coming to visit soon they said that we should have another dinner party with him, so that should be fun!