Stacey's Bodacious Japan Trip: "Let's Aizu-ing!" Day 2. and Japanese Thanksgiving!

11/27/16

The next day, a little worse-for-wear, we ate breakfast at a little diner across the street from my friend’s house called Coco’s. It had freshly made breakfast food as well as any breakfast drink you could want! I wasn’t able to eat much, but what I did eat I found tasty. After that we picked up some friends from the place they were staying and headed back to Fukushima City.

Cormac, Felipe and I had plans for Thanksgiving with a friend of ours, Mercedez. It was a second thanksgiving for Felipe and I, because we had gone to one a few days earlier in my town of Minamisoma, and since Cormac is Irish he had never celebrated Thanksgiving before so he was excited to experience this American holiday.

Mercedez started out the evening by playing a song for us on the shamisen! She had just started taking classes the previous month and we wanted to see her in action!

Here was some of the food that we ate.

And as we were all relaxing on the couch in a human-pile I was struck with the idea to create our own Renaissance-Painting-style photograph. Behold!

We talked and laughed all night. We did the tradition of going around the room and saying what we were thankful for. All of us felt some respite from the loneliness that can strike people living in a foreign country during the holidays. I think we were all grateful to have each other.

Here are some pictures from the Thanksgiving dinner we had on Wednesday 11/24/16 in Minamisoma.

Here our two Japanese guests (Aki and... i dont remember the girl's name) tried their hand at the thanksgiving tradition of breaking the wishbone.

Aki wins! What was his wish? We'll never know.

Happy Birthday to Olga!

At this one everything was homemade, and everyone contributed to the meal. I made the plate of cookies. They came from a package and tasted meh. Felipe made this amazing Colombian Rice with Chicken and stuff in it! So tasty!