International Festival

This weekend was the Shiso International Festival in Haga. The ALTs all helped out running an American booth selling hot dogs and puppy chow (snack food made of cereal coated in peanut butter, chocolate and sugar... yummy). Satomi, the teacher at the English school Lana and I worked at last month, helped us prepare all the ingredients and run the booth. We all drove to Haga at 8 am on Sunday (way too early for a weekend) and helped set up. There were performances from I think the Haga middle school band, and others. 

It was brutally hot, which is ridiculous considering it's almost November. We were racing around like crazy selling hot dogs at lunch time, we sold out of 300 hot dogs in about 15 minutes. Satomi, Lana and I had a little assembly line going, we were grabbing hot dogs and throwing them into buns. But overall it was a fun day.

That night, I went to dinner with Lara and my English teacher, Yanagita-sensei, and her husband and their two sons, ages 4 and 9. It turns out her husband is a teacher at Lara's school; I had no idea. Their family was hosting one of the teachers from Sequim, so they invited me and Lara along, probably as buffers. We went to this really nice restaurant owned by Mr. Yanagita's sister, and had a nice meal. There should be some pictures of that in the album (link below).

One of the coolest things, at the International Festival they had a room inside where you could try on a kimono, then they took your picture. Lara, Lana and I all tried them on. They're really heavy, and we weren't even wearing all the under-robes and things. It was pretty cool though, the kimono were really beautiful.

Pictures