International Lady's Club

It's been a busy week. Monday and Tuesday, I was subbing in the kindergarten class. I now have a new, six-year-old, boyfriend who thinks it's important to hug me every thirty seconds and won't leave the classroom without holding my hand. How sweet? Anyway, two days in a row with thirty-five small children left me happy to sleep in on Wednesday. Then today I had and ILC luncheon.
ILC stands for International Lady's Club. The last luncheon was on base with an American Easter theme. This time, the Japanese hosted, and we met in a conference room on the top floor of a department store. (Department stores here often have resteraunts and nicer rooms on the top floors.) The entertainment for the day was traditional Japanese dancing and obi tying. I so so so neeeeeed a camera. There were two middle-school aged girls from base who had learned the traditional dancing with the fans and everything, and then a group of women who devote some of their time to encouraging "wearing kimonos in casual settings." Part of doing this is apparently performing dances in traditional style that show women how to tie their obi's. They performed three today. The music for the first two was traditional sounding Japanese stuff. One showed the basic way to tie the kimono that I've seen around here before. The next was a slightly more elaborate version. The third, though, was the really cool one. They performed to the song "Pretty Woman" (no, really, they did) and the result was a flower shaped knot in the back of their kimonos. Super cool, and highly entertaining. It was hysterical to see these very traditional Japanese women swaying in a very traditional way to such a non-traditional song. The good news is, when they were done I realized I'd seen these women before. They were at the Girl's Day celebration on base. So I DO have a picture of them, though not during performance, unfortuantely. Here they are with their flower knots back in March:

Pretty cool, huh? And they can make it look like that while dancing. We all agreed that we'd have fallen over about twenty times and ended up with a knotted mess. It turns out that if you're dressing yourself, you do all the elaborate stuff up front then turn it around and tighten it when you're done. That makes it slightly more understandable, but it's still pretty amazing. Also, I won a door prize! I am now the proud owner of some Japanese refrigerator magnets. They're really quite cute.

The word from Zack is very possitive lately. He's done some really amazing things for his ship, apparently, but he won't tell me about them because he wants to tell me the whole story in person. So I have to wait for a looooong time to hear what on Earth he's so excited about. He also has had time to go out for beer at their current location with some friends, so I'm feeling much less sorry for him working so hard and much more jealous that he gets to see such cool places now. May be it's time for me to venture beyond this island... We'll see...