Another visitor!

Sue Yen is in Japan!

I couldn't get out of school early because we had an outdoor tea ceremony party to welcome new first year students to the tea ceremony club. So after all my classes today and serving of tea, I rushed to Sannomiya to meet Sue Yen.

It was so good to see her again and so surreal that both of us were in Japan again. We both first came to Japan when we were 15 years old on our school's exchange programme. I was so excited that we would be eating out every night and I didn't have to bother about grocery shopping and cooking. Ofcourse we had Kobe beef for dinner.

I also found out that our staff welcome (new teachers)/farewell (old teachers) dinner party was going to be held on Friday night. After much talk and hush-hushing, I was allowed to bring Sue Yen and the main aim was to keep low-key. But after we got there and the drinks were a'flowing, in true enkai style, nothing was taken too seriously and a special announcment was even made that "Chris-sensei has a friend visitingf from Australia. You can go practise speaking English with them!" So much for keeping it on the downlow. But it was such a good night and I'm glad Sue Yen got to experience an enaki.

The venue was Maiko Villa, a very impressive hotel/functions place where many people get married. It overlooks the ocean and has a beautiful garden with giant bonsai with a gorgeous view of Akashi Bridge. As always, the food was amazing. One of my even teachers invited Sue Yen to be a guest speaker in his class about foreign countries and went off to ask Kocho-sensei if it was okay. Everyone was rather tipsy so we just went with the flow.

Afterwards we went out to an izakaya with some of the teachers and ate and drank somemore. Even though me head began to hurt, it was a really fun night.