A night on the town...

So one of my students is a traditional dancer and at the moment she`s doing a show at a beer garden...hmmm....that`s what I thought, but Spencer and I decided to take a trip over there to watch her dance this evening, the place was fantastic. Beautiful green lawns and immaculate pine trees vied for attention with the Viking style torch like things and the dancers themselves! It cost a fortune so all we managed was a miniscule pizza and something called "grilled yams" - I could live without the yams, they were uhm... crunchy... strange things. Spencer said he thought yams were like sweet potatoes... They aren`t.
The dancing was utterly excellent, we arrived a bit late at 5.15(!) and were told we would have to wait for the next dance at 7.45 if we wanted to sit on the lawn... Not impressed by that- I tried pulling the old we are friends of the artiste thing which got us less than nowhere. When Spencer went out for a smoke (disgusting habit which I am trying to make him quit)- he happened to meet Satomi and she told him we could see the dancing from the comfy chairs in the lobby. So that`s what we did, and then she came back in and insisted we all had a photo taken, she grabbed some poor harassed sound guy and made him do it.
Then of course, because we had already been in line and taken the requisite ticket, we went back to the queue for the terrace and thoroughly ticked off a couple of guys by bypassing it. That was funny, they started moaning - obviously thinking we couldn`t understand them, so I whipped and the ticket which said "we were here an hour and a half before you so shut up" and started fanning my face with it... heh heh heh... How to make friends and influence people! Because the first set of dancing had finished people started to leave pretty quickly so we got escorted to a table with a great view and proceeded to watch two of the cast give instructions on how to do the next dance, apparently it was a "raccoon dog dance" I still have no idea. They were expecting the audience to get up and give it a go... See photos! I didn`t try as I was far too busy arguing with my camera but it looked like fun and the costumes were very beautiful. After that we were dragged over to have a Polaroid taken and Satomi took great delight in introducing us to everyone as her teachers... After that we had a brief chat and decided that we couldn`t afford to stay so we went to kinshicho and holed up in watami... Spencer decided to eat the family sized sashimi platter and I was just about tipsy enough to try some. It didn`t make me throw up but I won`t be having it again. Spent a pleasant hour teaching him vulgar British slang for being drunk!! Legged it to the station just in time for the last train and that was that. Probably ought to think about going to bed now, as is almost 2am...