American Night

On Wednesday night, Lori, Mike and I hosted "American Night" for the teachers at the school. Outside of visiting their classrooms everyday, we really haven't had much of a chance to spend time with the teachers because they are so busy all the time! We were excited to get a chance to hang out with them.

The three of us had planned out a menu and did the grocery shopping beforehand. Lori and I had both wanted to try unique family recipes, but due to lack of finding necessary ingredients, we decided on tacos for the main dish. Yes I know, tacos are not really American but they are my favorite food and I'm American, so it all works out :). We also wanted to make s'mores and strawberry shortcake for dessert and were more successful at finding these ingredients.

After work, we headed into our tiny kitchen to start cooking. Most of the teachers were eager to help us cook and it was a challenge trying to find jobs and supplies for everyone! We stuck a couple of teachers on the job of making the biscuits for the strawberry shortcake, since all the directions were in Japanese. We had just enough cutting boards and knives for teachers to cut up taco toppings and the strawberries. After these jobs were done, we had runners carry the food us to the classroom where we were going to have the party. Finally, after about an hour and a half of cramping and chaos, we were ready to eat! Here's some of the yummy food we had!















Lori and I with three teachers getting the tacos ready in the kitchen. We decided to use croissant rolls and tortillas instead of spending extra money on hard shells. Pretty good!



















Mike's guacamole was so good and was a big hit! Tortilla chips were also expensive, so we served it will flavored potato chips and Doritos.
















Here are two more teachers getting the biscuits ready for strawberry shortcake. Most of the teachers are pretty close to our age, like 21- 25 years ole. Osuka, the teacher on the right, is the oldest and she's been at the kindergarten for about 15 years already! Still looks pretty young to me!





















Here's Tamaki and I with the yummy strawberry shortcake! Tamaki is one of my favorite teachers. She's always so energetic and excited, and can pull of that great hairstyle! And her class was full of some of my favorite students, so I loved visiting it for lunch.

While we were eating, we watched the movie "Enchanted." The three of us were trying to pick a movie to rent and I thought of this one because Disney seems to be pretty popular in Japan and it is still a fairly new movie. Lori and Mike had never seen it, and I'm not sure Mike was too thrilled about getting it! We watched it with Japanese subtitles, and I think the teachers enjoyed it while Lori, Mike and I had fun laughing at the cheesy jokes and lines.

Afterward, we tried to insist on doing the dishes and letting the teachers go home and get some rest before work the next day, but they ended up helping us with the cleaning. They are just so nice! The night was a lot of fun and I hope they had as good of a time as we did.