Rural Shimonoseki Enkai

The four rural town BOEs of Shimonoseki got together for a belated leavers and welcome party for a few members. The evening was hosted by Markus's Hohoku-cho BOE in Takibe at Takibe onsen. I was a little disturbed by a few things: the amount of smoking going on among the men present; us 4 ALTs were sectioned off at the end of a table rather than allowed to sit amoungst the Japanese people; the main dish was a pork nabe. I don't eat pork. And this was the most expensive enkai I have ever been to. I did not like that I paid tons of money for there to be many foods I could not eat.

Apparently Hohoku-cho is famous for squid. Here you can see an example.What you cannot see in this photo is that the creature was still very much alive as I ate its raw flesh. I have seen before where the tenticles are moving. But this time, as I was nearly finished, I noticed that something in its body was pulsating (a heart, maybe?) Very strange. Marc, Markus, Jon, and I ammused ourselves for many minutes by poking it with chopsticks repeatedly to see if it would start moving. Sick, sick people we are.


After an awkward finish to what ended up being a measly hour's worth of karaoke, we boared this snazzy bus which took us back to our towns. Here we are trying to entertain ourselves.

But we didn't need to entertain ourselves too much because this fellow from Marc's BOE made us laugh plenty.