Tabesugimashita...

The barbecue was today!

It was a lot of fun.

We went to the train station at about noon and rode to Oita, from where Shingo picked us up and drove us to his parents' house. And there was a pile of food on the grill there for us. Also, the barbecue was apparently a small party. There were the three of us, Shingo's parents, his sister, and a few of his dad's friends and their wives.

The food was really good (aside from the arbitrary shellfish. Apparently it's expensive and I felt bad for not liking it, but not bad enough to eat more) but they kept insisting we ate more. And more. And more. My jaw hurt from chewing and my stomach was more than full, but they insisted "You can eat more. Your stomach only 1/3 full." I'm not sure what kind of alien logic they were running on, but it was definitely about 4/3 full at that point. And on top of that we had to politely not refuse dessert.

So basically, you go to a Japanese person's house, you're going to get fed. And there is absolutely no way out of it.

The people there were friendly and asked the usual set of questions. I also learned that dragonfly is tanbo and that the weather is unseasonably hot and wet so that's why there are so many of them all of a sudden. Also there is a Canon factory and a Toshiba factory in the city, which was apparently important to point out to me. Go figure.

Afterwards we got back to Beppu and the remnants of last night's festival (which I did not attend because it wasn't advertised on campus for some reason) were still around. Lots of people in traditional garb which is always exciting. The girls always look especially pretty in their kimonos, and I really wish I had a guy's yukata cause they look comfy. There were food vendors around still but that was about it aside from the fireworks later that night, but I've seen fireworks before and that's not big.

Besides, I still had this paper to finish!

So I came back, and finished my paper oh... not too long ago. So that's just barely done, and I submitted it online. Studying Japanese right now for the exam part 1 tomorrow, and the exam part 2 is the day after. Chances are that I'll skip a blog tomorrow to get some extra studying in, so here's your heads up.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm still digesting.