Thanksgiving!

Well, our Thanksgiving celebration with all of our Japanese friends was a huge success today! We had so much fun getting to spend the day showing our appreciation to all of the special people in our lives here. We tried to do all traditional American foods, but since no Asian meal is complete without rice, there is a picture of Rachel getting the rice cooker going with our neighbor, Kazuko. Also before we ate, Andy gave a short speech in Japanese thanking all the people for the many things they've done for us throughout this year that we've lived in Japan. After he gave a speech, Luke said a short prayer in Japanese, which I will load a video of soon.



Here's all the food! All the girls on the team worked really hard to pull off this event, and it went so well! The food was all delicious. Thank you SO much to the many people who donated food for this special day!
We ordered the turkey off of a company called the Foreign Buyers Club of Japan because they don't have turkey here. So as Luke was carving the turkey, all the Japanese people were coming over to take a picture of it!




Dessert time! Japanese people don't bake and pies are a really rare item in Japan, so everyone was getting out their cameras again to take pictures. We made apple, pumpkin, pecan, and chocolate pies as well as fudge.



At the end of our night Kunio (one of Sterling's teacher's husband), got out his guitar and started playing some songs for us all. The kids loved it and danced around while he played. It was funny because he played American songs (the Beatles, Elton John, etc.) so none of us knew all the words and of course neither did the Japanese people, but it was still fun!