This will be a post mostly of pictures;

And just to make things interesting the pictures are not in chronological order...sorry it will be a tad disjointed.

In Brief, this saturday I went to my first Okinawan wedding, much fun. I also failed in my endeavour get much study done due to one thing or another! Oh yes, I also had my last english conversation club lesson...sniff :(.
Me in my wedding get-up.

The Bride and Groom in their final costumes. The Bride, Arisa Teachaa is from my school.

So here I am with my English conversation club kids. I decided to fast forward Easter and have an Easter lesson, mainly because I though it would be fun and I had some rather delish Easter eggs I had bought on base I wanted to use. We painted eggs, had an egg hunt outside and rolled eggs. Much fun was had by one and all.



Yeah, looking good! I had plans of getting a sly one hour of study in on the ferry back to Izena but this cool cat had other ideas.

He had accomplices too, I didn't stand a chance, look at the evil intent on their faces! They had been to run some race on the main island and decided I was going to be their antidote to the boredom of the ferry ride.

Moshi moshi! This kid really liked to pretend to talk on my phone.
I and my fellow teachers after the wedding and before heading to the nijikanme (2nd party). As you can see we are all clutching identical bags, an unlikely accessory matching disaster!? No, at Japanese weddings guests pay the Bride and Groom ichi man (50 quid) and then recieve a present of about equal value! Wicked! I got two for some reason, I didn't take two! I was GIVEN two! But then I went ahead and thought I would just leave them BOTH in the pub....luckily Big Ben (whose house I stayed at) was a wee darlin' and popped down and picked them up for me.
Rocking out to the music on my shuffle. Yeah baby!
The eggs my kids painted, pretty good ne!

So yah, the wedding eh. An Okinawan wedding is a little more fun and lavish then a mainland wedding I am told. At an okinawan wedding approx. 400 people come while the best the mainland Japanese can do is a meagre 100. There are also many performances by friends, family and work colleagues of the Bride and Groom. As a work colleague of the Bride (Arisa 先生) I and the other teachers performed a silly dance dressed up as construction workers. We wore white helmets, long-johns and painted out faces in the most ridiculous manner conceivable! The Bride and Groom wore three different costumes the finest of which was the first; splendiferous white wedding kimonos but I was too excited and forgot to take a picture. There was also a professional announcer/singer (yes one person did both)! It was Nancy in case any of you know her, does radio I believe. One assumes she must REALLY like the sound of her own voice. So the wedding was fun, highlights were doing my first BANZAI! Very excited I got to do that, I will cherish the memory along with when I got my first GOKOROSAMA. Another personal highlight was getting a string of paper flags. Allow me to elaborate, after we banzai-ed the happy couple (after they came and lit a candle on our table) we were wildly out of control and let of party crackers willy-nilly. One cracker emitted a coloured string of paper flags, all the flags of the world! For some reason it stuck me that I should very much like to have those flags but I dismissed the thought as silly. About ten minutes later I hear genki 'KUREIGU SENSEI' (Craig teacher in japanese) down to my side, I look down and there is the little daughter of the cleaning lady presenting those very flags to me! I was touched! 'Oh thankyou, Arigato!' I cried, (cried as in said it loudly, not cried tears! Suggest otherwise and I will punch you). I had just had a conversation with her and asked her to kindly look forward to studying english with me when he becomes a yochien (kindergarten-er) later this year. Must have made an impression or just got plain lucky, that or she is a very perceptive and cunning child, her or her mother. Anyway I was happy. After the wedding we went to J's bar and much fun was had. My teachers all left earlyish but a bunch of mainland Japanese came to keep me company. They were very nice and good company. It was after 2am before I left! My impressions of mainland Japanese are that they have been very nice and friendly. Although it is oft said how much warmer the okinawans are. This is the conventional knowledge but I am not convinced, not that okinawans are unfriendly, far from it! However all the Japanese I have met have been extraordinarily nice. I had not yet met as many friendly and helpful people as I did in Nara. I felt like saying well if Okinawans are so much friendlier how comes it's your guys who are here talking with me (and extolling the virtues of the Okinawans none the less). They did tell me that in mainland Japan the Groom cannot invite ANY females to his wedding, not even work colleagues as a relationship would be suspected! The same applies to the Bride. That is a bit crazy. I pursued the point a little and got the impression that perhaps if you are really in culture then the okinawan culture is kinder but for someone who is still a guest in this country it doesn't make a huge difference. It is a commonly noted aspect of general Japanese culture that they are very welcoming and accommodating toward guests. On Sunday I met some friends of BBs from mainland Japan who were visiting him. The family of a previous student of his. They were also nice and funny and didn't mind at all that a random (me) accompanied them to the pineapple park. Ah ok that's all, oh no, Takeru is back. One of the first friends I made on the island. He left to get a job on the mainland ages ago but he is back for a few months, nice. Those who came to my island all those moons ago he was the guy with the afro (sadly lacking now).