Double the Matsuri, double the sarcasm

Today, Chiyaki and Chisaki (two of the girls I went to dinner with the other night) came with me to the Tohoku Daigaku Kokusai Matsuri (international fest.), where there were booths with food from 31 different countries, traditional music and dance performances, and tons of mud (thanks to the typhoon). My shoes are a mess. The festival very well also might have been called "Third World Country Matsuri" or "We All Communicate with Broken English and Broken Japanese Matsuri". Gone were the familiar flavors of European and American countries; however if you like the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa, this was your cup of tea. The food was generally pretty good, but since it was all prepared in booths, it was pretty much limited to fried things. The girls and I had Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Ghana (-ese? -nian? whatever; food from Ghana), Turkish, Romanian, Egyptian, and Bangladeshi* food. The Bangladesh booth literally forced us to eat it by dragging us over and handing us the food, so that wasn't really our choice. I don't think all those countries get along very well because I definitely got a stomachache midway through.

It's in situations like this that I am at my most sarcastic, and luckily, because I learn so much of my Japanese from watching TV (just like how I learn pretty much everything else I know), I can be pretty sarcastic in Japanese as well. I actually find being sarcastic in Japanese to be even funnier than in English because of how polite Japanese generally is. Though I should start watching something other than my usual palette of variety shows, because I'm risking becoming too sarcastic.

There was apparently going to be a 'dance party' after the food festival (I'm not sure how that bizarre group of generally awkward and ugly foreigners was going to turn into a dance party, but I'll take their word for it), Chisa and Chiyaki don't dance, so we took off for the larger and much more official matsuri being held today - the Yosakoi Matsuri. I'm not sure what Yosakoi matsuri is supposed to celebrate, but it was pretty typical matsuri fare - traditional dancing, lots of booths selling okonomiyaki and takoyaki and other fried foods, booths for games for the kids, etc. Pretty lively, but only entertaining for a short time. The three of us then headed for the bookstore for an English lesson. Unfortunately their questions about English were so difficult, I couldn't explain them. I basically gave very spotty explanations followed by "uh, just read a lot and have conversations with people a lot; you'll start to understand". I'm such a great English teacher! Oh, and in the bookstore I came across this one series of language books that was for conversations between men and women in different languages. So I started reading the korean version of the book outloud - starting with the chapter on conversations about sex. Hilarity ensued.

USC beat Cal - barely. Rejoice! They live for another week.

*my apologies to whoever corrected me on the use of the word Bangladeshi. I will be more culturally sensitive from here on out. If the 'anonymous' person who corrected me is someone I know, I have my ideas on who it might be, but in any case, really: was that necessary? Come on people.