Meet the Family..... and some Karaoke too

Ok soo..... firstly, I went to Shibuya today with Sarah and our friend Erin. Erin went to UW-Madison too, graduated and now lives in Hokkaido (The northern island of Japan). She was an exchange student at Keio two years ago. Poor girl lives in Hokkaido now, where its below freezing and has sooo much snow. Kinda like Wisconsin.. ha ha ha.. Only in Japan there is no central heating.... :(

Anyway, she is in town for a few days and today we went out to dinner with her and our other friend Keita. It was her "bachelorette" party. She's getting married in a month to her boyfriend of three years whom of which she MET at Keio university. He was an exchange student from Canada. After they both finished the program, they had a long distance relationship for two years.. and are now getting married. I'm so happy for her.

After dinner with them, I prepared to go out for dinner with Kouta and.. du duuuuuuuun... his UNCLE from Kumamoto. This was the first relative besides Kouta's brother Yuuki that I've met. To say the least I was really nervous. Kouta was going to arrive late soo that made me even more nervous. We were all supposed to meet @ Hachiko in Shibuya.. the place where EVERYONE meets in Shibuya. So anyway, I got there before Kouta.. I spotted Yuuki and saw that he was with his Uncle and a few cousins and his girlfriend Chika. I didn't want to approach them without Kouta being there cause I was so nervous, so I tried to hide behind some other people until I Kouta got there. Unfortunately, Yuuki almost instantly saw me and recognized me and called me over. I reluctantly went and there Yuuki introduced me as Kouta's girlfriend. The uncle and cousins' jaws dropped to the ground. Well apparantly, no one in Kouta's family had heard that he had a girlfriend let alone that she was a foreigner. IT was a nice surprise and everyone got all excited about it. They teased Kouta relentlessly through the dinner of delicious Korean food and scolded him for not learning English. ha ha ha Kouta's uncle even took my picture and sent it via phone email to Kouta's grandma and his mother. In which an hour later, Kouta's dad called Kouta and was teasing him via telephone. By the end of the night everyone new about Kouta's new, American girlfriend and all was well.

To be honest, I didn't know how his family was going to take that I was foreign. In the states everyone is of different races so interracial relationships, although sometimes still a wary subject, is more common and accepted. In Japan, especially since I'm American, I've heard it can be really tough on couples. But they all seemed to like me well enough, and although I felt as if I were some sort of novelty at first ('look she can speak Japanese' 'Look at how well she uses chopsticks' etc. seemed too be some of the features of the Paulina Product).. It seemed as if by the end of the night, after speaking with me more and getting to know me a little bit better, everyone seemed to accept as Kouta's girlfriend.. American or not... which was nice.
Yay for international relationships..... I wonder if my dad had the same worries back when he and my mom first started dating...