The Japanese Club Christmas Party

On Saturday I rolled out of bed to get up to City Hall for chorus rehearsal – the Japanese class is meant to be singing Christmas carols at the party from 12.30. So no rehearsal, no one was there (well Alex and the Japanese organizers were) so I just sat near the heater! Finally ‘rehearsed’ around midday.

Anyway, there was flamenco dancing, our chorus, random games (I won some tomato flavoured Korean biscuits) and then the JETs from Yamaguchi City had to talk about Christmas in their hometowns/countries – China, Spain and the US. The Yamaguchi City JETs are the ones who can speak fluent Japanese, so I didn’t understand what they were saying – could guess though. Spanish girl talked about Christmas Eve, American about all the food, and the Chinese JET simply said, we don’t celebrate it! Food was good, though. I was surprised that more of my students weren’t there – perhaps a good thing given our ‘chorus’ – for the record, we did Rudolph (at breakneck speed for some reason) and White Christmas.

Possibly the worst part were the Japanese people who, having been encouraged to talk to the 'friendly foreigners' by the MC at the beginning of the party, decided that 'talking to me' meant listing all the places that they had seen me in the last week. Stalker much?