School on Friday seemed to fly by, and once again I'm amazed with how fast each week goes and I'm always filled with a bittersweet feeling once I acknowledge that. in my People and Culture Class, my group decided to do our presentations on the history and tradition of Tanabata and to do our second presentation on American interpersonal relationships.
At E.S.S. we watched Takami recite a speech that apparently Obama gave in Prague (this was news to me), and once again, I am amazed by the obsession the Japanese people have with him. O_o it really boggles my mind! I seriously think sometimes that Japanese people know more about the everyday movements of my President than I do...We also got paired off to play a game and I re-met Yuki (...not to be confused with Yuuki, and I say I re-met, because as she so kindly pointed out, I all ready met her ><), Yasu's girlfriend, who is quite possibly the most sickingly (in a good way) cute 21 year old I have ever met O_O;. Seriously. She's a complete sweetheart and I hope I get to talk to her again soon!
After wards, the boys and girls made like the Red Sea and parted ways, though we all had a
mini-Reunion at Max-Valu, where we all went to buy food and the like for our separate Nomikai's. The girl's party was at Nana's house, a freshman who is also in my People and Culture Class. We kinda just sat around eating and talking for three hours...and I have to say Japanese girl talk is quite different than American girl talk. They are far more cutsey and reserved than most American girls that I know. I think 
literally the topic of discussion at one point was how formally or how not formally some of them speak to their boyfriends and how they address them. As you can imagine, I had a ball with that conversation, lol. They're all fun and my friends though, so it was a good time. :)Around midnight we got a call from Nagai, one of the boys, telling us it was safe for the girls to come over to the boys Nomikai (apparently they go through this ritual every year), so somehow we eventually ended up at one of the freshman boy's house for the next three hours. I spent most of my time bouncing between talking to Rinda and Takami, Sat-chan and Ayaka, and Tony and Yasu (when they weren't boxing me out to have "man talk" >:P) Despite the fact that the party was still going strong at 3 AM, I called it quits because I had UNESCO camp the next day, and Rinda was very much the gentleman and took me home because I wasn't quite sure where the house was in relation to my apartment. >< Yay winding Japanese country roads.
UNESCO camp, albeit it a little unorganized in terms of its planned activities, was very fun. :)
We went to Gozenyama, a mountain about 30 minutes away from the Kaikan. In Japan, they don't do school buses, so all they have are Limo and public buses, which are way to expensive to rent, so we had to go in caravans to the mountain. The only thing was is that there were only so many cars with so many seats, so it took three hours and three round-way trips to and from the mountain to get everyone there O_OI mostly hung out with Yagi-chan, a girl I befriended at my first UNESCO meeting, Nimo and Nozomi, a girl fresh off the plan from studying abroad a year in Wisconsin. When we later
were snacking on food and playing games in little groups, she broke out some American candy and I freaked out when I saw Butterfingers for the first time in 2 months. Shortly after everyone finished getting there, we headed down to a huge pavilion to have a Barbeque....and
mmmmmmmmm Japanese barbeque is yummy. There was SO much food. I think we were down at the pits for at least three, if not three and a half hours. We did Yakiniku, vegetables, and when someone finally broke out the Yakisoba, I honestly couldn't stomach eating anymore. Trying to figure out where the Japanese put it all really boggles the mind.Since they're having a World Sweet's Day in June, and I suggested we make S'mores...only to
find out later I couldn't go to the World Sweet's Day because I signed up to go to AKEL in Tsukuba with E.S.S., I brought along S'mores(ish) stuff for the campfire, to teach them how to make them. Japan doesn't really have graham crackers, so I just settled for these weird graham crackerish cookie things that are dipped in chocolate on one side and called it a day. I bought four packs of those and three bags of marshmallows, figuring that S'mores would be to sweet for them to have more than one, and by defacto, everyone at camp would be able to try one...WRONG.
I'm pretty sure they demolished it in 10 minutes. Seriously. Every time I turned around someone was opening a new pack of cookies. O_O. The boys liked it the most I think, which
surprised the heck out of me, since Japanese men notoriously do not like sweet foods (though every boy I keep meeting so far seems to be proving this theory wrong). I showed them how to carefully make a golden brown marshmallow for the demo, so they were all shocked when I just went and lit my own personal marshmallow on fire the second time around. I like mine burned, so they were really confused. I think the boys then tried to impress me with a show of manliness....which essentially ended up being them burning their marshmallows to and making sure that I saw they were eating the marshmallows the way I liked them. They were a hoot!After that, we played Mafia, in which I was cast in the role of the Mafia, and of course promptly died, because I can't lie to save my soul. It was okay, because my partner-in-crime, Ingen, (which was her nickname by the way... and Ingen means Green Bean in Japanese O_O; ...this greatly confused me at first) over came all adversaries and even got the cop killed off before winning the game! Woot!
We played some other odd game that involved getting into groups of however many syllables words had, with the losers having to do self-introductions in front of the group and get grilled about their love life. All the words were in Japanese and I couldn't really hear anyway since the boys kept running around in between words shouting some famous can can song, which I guess is the same as humming the Jeopardy song in this instance...but luckily I never lost since I just sat down with whoever grabbed my arm :)
We then proceeded to, what else?, have a Nomikai in our little Japanese hut type thing on the
mountain. Speaking of which, the place where we stayed was pretty awesome. In addition to futons for everyone to sleep on (not that they did much sleeping), the building had Japanese baths for both men and women, bathrooms, tatami rooms for sleeping, a kitchen and a few open rooms where we congregated for the Nomikai and proceeded to play games that I still don't fully understand why we were playing, but got the gist of.Because I was so tired from the E.S.S. Nomikai the day before, I called it quits around midnight (I know, I'm a lil' ol' grandma), and went to sleep on a futon in one of the enclosed rooms. I kept waking up every 2-3 hours from the noise and was amazed at the amount of times the person sleeping next to me was different...and the noise from the main room never ceased. There were literally people who just never ended up sleeping. O_O Japanese people are insane!!! How do they run on so little sleep?!
The next morning we played some more games outside, such as Korean hop scotch, find-the-person - who - matches - the - description - on - the - piece - of - paper - and - then - run - around - a - tree - with - them - to - be - the - first - to - the - finish - line, and....this little odd
game, pictured here. It was like some weird, messed up game of leap frog that eventually culminated in every person bent over having someone on their back O_O; Let your imagination run wild, because I have NO clue what the ACTUAL purpose of the game is, or how someone could not see what I'm seeing when they invented this game...That and Onigiri were what I was finished my camp experience with. Yummy. ;)
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