Ocha + July 4th!

I didn't really do much yesterday, so I will only talk about today. Today, for our ususal Advanced Ladies' Class, we went to a tea museum. Machiko is a tea ceremony teacher, so she took all of us (plus her daughter in law) to the museum where we got to sit in on a pretty casual tea ceremony. It was a lot of fun.

First, a lady brought us a Japanese sweet that we were to eat before the tea. The tea, or ocha, is supposed to be pretty bitter, so they give you the sweet to sweeten your mouth before the tea. Another lady was making the tea. We were each served tea in a bowl like cup. Each of the cups are around 500 years old. They even change the cups according to the seasons. The cups we used? Today was the last day they were used this season. They are changed out tomorrow.

I was complimented on my sitting by both the man telling us about the museum and the ceremony and the lady who served us. Machiko also said that I was very good at the ceremony, and in 3 weeks she is going to teach me how to actually make the tea! I am way excited!




The museum is built in a very large, beautiful Japanese garden! Oh man! I want to live there! The place was gorgeous! We walked around a bit after the tea ceremony.




If you would like to see more pics of the garden and tea ceremony (courtesy of Laura! :D):

http://www.facebook.com/karissa.dennis?cropsuccess=#/album.php?aid=276712&id=814700376&ref=mf

After we got back from the tea museum, I hurried on over to ECS. I was kinda in charge of the kid's classes today :S. I was to teach them a little about July 4th and then do some activities. for the first class, it was only the one girl. We read a book together called The Fourth of July Mice....I found it to be kind of ridiculous. haha. After that, we colored a US flag and made a flag Japanese fan. The second class, we colored flags, counted stars, and then made pinwheels. They really seemed to like it. We also ate watermelon popsicles. The looked like watermelon slices and tasted pretty much just like a watermelon...only with chocolate seeds. mmm.

The last class of the night was the Intermediate class with Takako and Misaki. We talked about too and enough. After the class was over, Misaki gave me a present. She gave me two packages of paper balloons, one pufferfish and one strawberry and a takoyaki (octopus ball) key chain. It was so sweet. :)