Tea and Taiko

Saturday evening we went to a public tea ceremony held at the Yamasaki cultural center. I'm not really sure what the purpose of it was. Lana got tickets from a student of hers. We got to watch them make tea and then we drank it, which was an experience. I hate green tea anything, and a lot of things here are green-tea flavored. But drinking actual green tea is another experience altogether. It's very bitter, and it's kind of room temperature. Lara and Lana both loved it, but I had to literally force myself to drink the entire bowl, because, as it was part of the tea ceremony, you had to drink the whole thing. I took a few sips and then put the bowl down, intending to finish it once I had gotten up the courage, but apparently this was the wrong thing to do, because the women serving the tea came over and were like, "oh, are you not drinking?" so I gathered you are not supposed to put your bowl down, or it means you are done. So I had to choke down the rest of the bowl of tea in a few gulps, and physically restrain myself from grimacing, then assure the woman who collected my bowl that it was "oishikatta" (delicious). Despite the tea itself, I really enjoyed seeing the tea ceremony, and participating in a local event. I saw a few of my students and one of the women who works at my school. It really is a very small town.

On Sunday we went to a Taiko drum concert at a store called Wakon in Yamasaki. We stop in there to browse a lot, especially after our ritual Saturday morning sushi run at the kaiten sushi restaurant, and we got to talking with the women who work there, and they told us about this concert. It was small, maybe 40 or 50 people on folding chairs in a corner of the store, and three drummers and a shamisen player (a shamisen is a traditional Japanese instrument which, if I understood what the boy who was playing it told us, costs about as much as a car. See here.) I had been feeling down the past few days because of the bugs and the second year students (see September 19th post), and then yesterday was really rainy and gross, and I spent the entire day scrubbing my house from top to bottom, and STILL there were a million fruit flies, and the place is still a mess. But the concert really put me in a better mood. It was very intimate, so it was a real experience. The musicians were chatting with the crowd, and they were really good. They even had people come up from the audience and play the drums. As the token gaijin, of course got pulled up on stage. It was a lot of fun.