World Festa

The next morning (after Nara) Matt came in from Kyotango and Laurel joined us at Mister Donuts before we hopped on the bus to go to the International Center for the Warudo Fesuta (World Festa). This is an event designed to bring together a large group of foreigners from different countries to introduce traditional foods from their country. This year it was Foods You Eat in February.

Do you see my dilemma?

1. What is “American food”?

2. What is American food that we eat especially in February?

The whole separating food by season thing is a Japanese way of thinking. We just don’t do it, nor do we need to. America just imports the things it doesn’t have so we have most of our foods year round. It isn’t like Japan where cherries just stop showing up in stores at a certain time or you freeze in your apartment so you eat hot nabe in February.

So I chose to do chocolate covered strawberries because of Valentines Day and because everyone else was doing a real meal and I thought a dessert might be nice.

So I packed up my nearly 170 chocolate covered strawberries and went off to the center with my faithful sidekicks (eventually the discussion of seasonal goods led to a very interesting encounter….that comes up later…read on.)

At the event I set up my strawberries, which soon began sweating so I stood over them fanning them with pieces of paper. I probably looked like an idiot. BUT, everyone kept coming up saying how good the strawberries looked.

I was told I had to give a short speech explaining how to make the strawberries and then about food mileage….Unfortunately I had asked last week if I would have to speak and my boss said no…so I had left all my prep work at home (I should know better). So I had nothing on food mileage and just sort of made a few jokes about the American bringing dessert and buying tons of chocolate alone….

It was a bit embarrassing because my supervisor had come just to hear me talk, but I appreciated the support. He even took some pictures for me. So we gave him a strawberry as he dashed off to the office.

When they finally began letting the poor people eat, my table got kind of rushed. People came back for 2nds, and 3rds, and 4ths. Kids were taking handfuls of chocolate covered strawberries. It was kind of amazing. They all kept apologizing for taking more, but said how good they were. I had enough so I didn’t mind. It was cute to watch the kids just walk up and take again while the adults sheepishly walked up and asked permission.



I think it was on the way back that I mentioned something about 季節限定 kisetsu gentei, which means seasonal limit, or seasonal goods in most circumstances. It is used to identify what foods are only sold for a certain season (for example, my favorites, the Kit Kats). Matt, who knows a lot of Japanese, asked about what I meant and when I explained he was like

“Oh! Level Up!” accompanied by a very geeky dragonball z like move. (the Japanese actually do say Level Up when they improve in certain things, taking it from video games).

This led to a long discussion eventually culminating in the creation of our own ALTs of Kameoka plus Matt from Kyotango Comic Book. Yes…a comic book of a video game.

I will hopefully soon be adding our character sketches. I doubt you will find it as funny as us, seeing as there are some inside jokes, but in case anyone is interested I will try to get some images up on the blog (^_^)