Celebrations

Richard has gotten back blogging, so I thought I'd contribute some photos. We've had some great celebrations over the last few months. The pics today are from two of the biggest. The first was the 15th anniversary of our samba escola G.R.E.S. Sol Nascente. (Escola literally means "school" in Portuguese. In the case of samba, it means more like group or club.) Sol Nascente means "rising sun" in Portuguese. For our 15th anniversary party, the group rented a restaurant with a small stage in Kobe and proceeded to make music, drink, eat and be merry for an evening. There were lots of small performances by affiliated music groups, as well as a samba performance by another escola in Kobe. Finally, this year's members topped it off with a performance ourselves. I've posted some pics on facebook, but here are some of my favorites from the evening.

Dark beer and a guitar. 

The venue of our party. You can kind of see the small stage at the end of the room.

Wearing our bateria shirts, which show that we're musicians with the group.

The dancer in purple and the guy in the white shirt are our leaders and the founders of the school. The three girls in front are in bear costumes with LED sunglasses...It's an inside joke, don't ask.

After the official party, many people stayed around for a "pagode," basically an informal jam session of relaxed samba music.

The other big party we went to recently was the wedding reception of a samba friend.

The first plate of food at the reception, which was Chinese style. You can see lobster salad, fried chicken, pickled cucumbers, fried fish, rolls of various kinds and tons more that I can't remember. 

The bride and groom cutting the cake. Most of the cake was a wooden/plastic form, with a small piece of actual cake/whipped cream for them to cut into for pictures.

Remnants of several courses of food on our table. Still left are some amazing candied sweet potatoes and sesame mochi balls with sweet red beans inside. It's proof of how stuffed we were that there were still some on the table.

Our table of samba friends.

So there's an old Japanese joke about how businessmen put their ties on their heads when really drunk and letting loose. Our friend here isn't so drunk, but the atmosphere was ripe for a little joke about ties on heads.

Me with the bride in her 3rd costume of the event, a Korean hanbok. (Her husband's family is Korean-Japanese.)

Richard showing off his new bow tie.

Here we're at the second party, which was held at a restaurant not too far from the reception hall. The reception had tons of family and was more formal, this party is for the bridge and groom and their friends. 

The bride singing samba at the second party.

Richard making friends.

Oh, and we both won jerky in the raffle. Other prizes included gift certificates to restaurants and various food prizes.  

So, you can see it's been a fun month! In July we have another performance with our samba group and then my parents and brother will be visiting from the states, so it should be another interesting month!