Sweet 16

For Erika and Rachel's Sweet 16 I took them for a special Japanese cultural day. We spent an afternoon of cultural exchange with a group of lovely Japanese women. They dressed us in traditional Japanese kimonos, walked through a Japanese garden and went to a very serious tea ceremony. We now know how women felt back when they wore corsets! Man were we bound soooo tight inside those kimonos! It took two people to fully dress each us and it was difficult to walk, and we didn't even wear the traditional Japanese shoes! To our untrained, American eyes, the materials that they laid out for us to choose from didn't even match, but when put together looked just beautiful and "just right". During our walk through the gardens and feeding the enormous Koi, we met some other women dressed in kimonos also. One of them had a friend that served tea in the tea house, which was closed to the public for the day for a private, very important tea ceremony. She invited us to join the ceremony, after she asked permission from the master of ceremonies, and we happily joined them. We had a "sweet" from one of the finest Japanese bakeries in Nagoya, and had very green and foamy green tea (Yuck, with a capital Y!). At the end of the tea ceremony the man even made a couple of jests about Boeing, the American dollar, and even Ichiro, for our benefit. We returned to the ladies who had dressed us to have our scheduled tea with them, and they proceeded to present us with gifts and sweets and tea. It was a most wonderful experience!