Our Welcome Party

The day has come…we finally have internet at home. We also have cable TV, which might not sound like big news but for us it’s better than Christmas day. We are now able to instant message friends and family which means that we will be able to communicate more frequently and in more detail. Postings should get better, more frequent and most importantly for us, it will not cost us a fortune every week.

On Sunday we had our welcome dinner with the Japanese staff and fellow teachers. We went to an Indian restaurant called Hishbu (pictured above). It was great to have the Japanese staff there with us because they ordered all the food for us. We tried some new things but as Martina said: “It all tastes like curry”. We tried some sizzling curry chicken (Fajita style) and our main meal was this huge triangular piece of bread called nan (see picture below for actual size).

What makes this bread different is that it has no yeast therefore making it a flat bread and we ate it with all kinds of curry dipping sauces. This restaurant was a little westernized in the sense that we didn’t have to take off our shoes to sit on the floor and they had no chopsticks; everyone used a fork.

After dinner we headed to a nearby Navy bar called Playmate. The original plan was to go to this bar for one drink and then head to JJ Club for some karaoke. However one drink turned into a few and then Trevor and Brendan started karaoking at the bar so we decided to just stay there even though the song selection was not as extensive as JJ’s. The bar walls were covered in US dollar bills with messages from Navy men and women. We took up almost the entire bar as you can see in the picture (from left to right: Martina, Trevor, Kirk, Brendan, Junko, Motomi, Miki, Heather and myself).

The bartenders were friendly and spoke a great deal of English (Nick is pictured below with Tomoko, one of the bartenders). Their current favorite music to play at the bar appeared to be Jack Johnson while people were not karaoking. As the night progressed, Nick and I did a little more karaoke before hitting up the billiard tables.

We were surprised to see an American in the bar that was able to sing Japanese songs very well. He was nice enough to buy us a round of drinks and we soon sparked a conversation about the story of our lives and what had brought each of us to Japan. His name was Matt and he had moved to Japan 9 years ago while active in the Marines. Just a few weeks ago he completed his military service and now works as a contractor for a private company on the Navy base here in Sasebo. He and Nick had a long conversation and eventually exchanged numbers with tentative plans for us all to meet up next weekend. He even offered to get us onto the base if we ever want to visit an American grocery store or satisfy our cravings for Taco Bell.