Hanging out with the Japanese
For my brothers wedding a really great family friend from Japan flew over and brought her family. I drove them from San Francisco to Grass Valley and back again, and also had a few meals with theme in between. It was really a treat to meet people from the Japanese culture and it was an amazing learning experience.
Only one of the six visitors spoke enough english to have much of a conversation (though, to be fair one of them was less than two years old), and yet it was so fun to communicate with the whole family via a handful of words we all knew, iPhone translation apps, and lots of hand motions and charades. All of them have such amazing personalities and were so willing to share their culture with us and teach us their language(i.e. let us butcher pronunciations). I hope some day I can visit them in their country, and that they all come back the the US to visit again sometime.
As an added note, out of the Americans that went to the Chinese lunch and used chopsticks, the Japanese family deemed me the best chopstick user! It's a small, but significant acknowledgment from them.
