Daily Life 5: Japanese Family over for Dinner




As I said in this other blog post, "We will write about these topics in the coming days."


Kailey and Atsuhiro-san in Americaya

hosted a Japanese family for dinner

A few months back Kailey's friend from Americaya invited us over to his home for a meal with his wife and two kids. Since it was a little outside of Kyoto he invited us to stay the night as well. We had a great time. We wanted to invite him to our place too, so we did.



We invited them over for a friday night meal. Atsuhiro-san, our friend, taught violin lessons until 8pm so they came afterwards. It was the first time we had really hosted anyone at our place here in Japan. Our room is quite small by Canadian terms, but reasonably wide by Japanese 1 bedroom specifications. Our plan was that Kailey would briefly tidy during the day, I would come home after studying and make some dinner, and Kailey would go up to Americaya to meet Atsuhiro-san and his family. (We decided upon some curry udon that I had recently been making and a greek salad.)

Things kinda went as planned.
oh yea, here's a picture of our apartment
Our apartment layout
Just as any guest preparation would go, we had some funny simple things turn into a sort of Cold War happening where the "red button" that would end the world could be pressed at any moment. It's funny what a little time constraint can do. We realized that we didn't have enough dishes to serve 6 people and decided we would buy some; but, Friday came and we found that neither of us had bought any dishes --- we got them. Kailey's "tidying-up" transformed into a full spring's cleaning, a 3 hour clean 0_0 --- the place was clean before guests arrived. I made a beautiful curry udon "broth" in our only pot and realized that it was time to cook the udon.....but I needed the in-use-pot for that --- put broth in rice cooker cooking bowl to free pot. I had some exquisitely cooked, but ridiculously slippery, udon noodles but did not have a strainer or udon-noodle-picking-up-ladle-type-thing to get the noodles into 6 bowls -..... I made it happen.
It wasn't stressful at the time, just funny =). 
Atsuhiro-san and company arrived. We finished making the greek salad and then ate together ... Japanese style! Japanese style means that we didn't use chairs, lots of fun :). Afterwards we ate some awesome dessert that they had brought, it was delicious.
After the meal



Quite satisfied we hung around after our meal. At this time we played with his kids who are 6 and 8. It was mostly Kailey that played with them. Atsuhiro-san and Saori-san [wife :)]'s kids are very proficient in games like 'Cat's Cradle' and non-electronic games, so we were able to do some of those games with them again, was fun. At this time I decided to show Atsuhiro-san and Saori-san some photo's of Canada that I had lying around on my computer. It was fun explaining the photo's in japanese. It's much easier to talk in a foreign language when you've got something concrete to talk about instead of trying to make small talk conversation with strangers.

having fun
hiding from the picture
While I was talking about photo's Kailey and the youngest were playing with various things in the apartment. Saneyuki is the youngest. He is quite comfortable crawling all over us, so it's fun to play =D. At one time he wanted to be tied up with a blanket so that he couldn't move then saying things to Kailey like " I can't move, I can't move" and " pick me up and move me to the chair" or something. Even though they are typical things that children might say, the novelty is that it is in japanese. Not JUST that it is in japanese, it's more about the fact that we were able to fully understand them =).

This was about the essence of the evening. It was a lot of fun =D

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Daily Life 4: Visiting James and Audrey<<<<                             >>>>Daily Life 6: Baseball Gloves

Our Ridiculous First Days in Japan: Day 1 (Travel from the Airport)

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Ben and Kailey lived in Japan not too long ago and also visit Kyoto every year.

Ben is developing a Japanese Practice site. It's current main functions are:
1. a Flash Card system that features a leveling system where you must answer correctly and "level up"to gain new cards, receive money and buy new decks - anime decks included!
2. Fill in the Blank system where you can choose to focus on particle practice or verb practice etc.
Japanese Practice Blog is here. Check out the Japanese Practice site here

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