Enkai

Tonight was the leaving meal for the teachers who will be off to new schools in April. This is one of the two parties of the year which are quite formal and involve a lot of speeches and suits. Not a good start for a party in my opinion. This year we had 8 teachers leaving, so the speeches seemed to go on forever, but this did have the advantage that by the time they got to the last few, they had a bit too much of the Dutch courage in them and one almost fell over when he stood up.

It was quite sad because a lot of my favourite teachers are leaving, including my supervisor and calligraphy teacher. Hopefully some nice ones will come to replace them. It means we are getting a new English teacher, so I am quite looking forward to working with someone new.

At Japanese parties they often do something called a "el". This maybe comes from the English word "yell", because this is what it seems to be. Some poor sod has to stand up in front of everyone, wave their arms frantically whilst shouting "sank you, sank you, Mr X" or "good luck, good luck, Mrs Y" very loudly and drawn out. Then everyone else, who are standing in a circle round you, clap along and say it all again, but very fast. It is a scary, cult experience, and so far in two and a half years I have never had to be that poor sod in the middle...but not this time. There I was, arms flailing, voice breaking mirrors, showing my tummy in front of all my co-workers because my top rode up when I waved my arms.

Other than that, this enkai was going rather well. I had managed to avoid the Japanese sake, and by limiting myself to beer was still in a relatively sober state when I left the building...well, tried to leave. Suddenly I heard "nikora-san, redo wine...dou?" from a little side room. It was late, I wanted to go home. I turned my head to see the chairman of the PTA, the head master and the head of the office sitting with a two litre bottle of wine. I wasn`t going anywhere, was I. So I sat down on the squeaky vinyl sofa next to kocho-sensei and accepted the rather sweet, chilled red wine. Ok, so the conversation was actually rather interesting and mostly stayed within my levels of Japanese, such as the finer points of Narnia and Harry Potter. However, a good deal of wine and an hour later, we had moved onto politics and culture. I was out of my depth. It was really time to leave. So I declined the top up of wine, accepted the offer to have the remainder of the wine to take home, and staggered off into the moonlight with the huge bottle under my arm, my shoes in the other hand, singing away to myself. I think it is important as a cultural ambassador for my country to remain cool and sophisticated at all times, and I think I manage it admirably.