Aloha, friends!
First of all, Happy Thanksgiving! We’re in Japan right now where it’s already Friday morning, so our Thanksgiving was yesterday. Since we were going on the road this week, our family celebrated Thanksgiving last weekend. So now we’re in Sendai which is located in Miyagi Prefecture, one of the three regions in Tohoku that was devastated by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami disaster. It’s pretty cold here (30’s) even though it’s a beautiful sunny day – we’re going to be in Sapporo in a few days, so I can only imagine how cold that’s going to be! Tokyo wasn’t as cold when we arrived the day before – it was only in the mid-50s. The cold weather hasn’t been good for Alex since he’s had a cold for a few days now. We did our first performance last night and I was afraid his voice was going to give out … but he made it, even with two hana hous! After the show, we all headed to a pub to enjoy some great nama beeru (draft beer) and gyu tongue. Gyu tongue is a Sendai specialty and it’s beef tongue – yeah, yeah, I know it sounds gross, but trust me .. it’s really good! After a few beers the exhaustion from traveling and the show really hit me so we went back to our hotel for a good night’s sleep. Today we head out to Onagawa, a seaside town that was heavily damaged by the tsunami where we’ll be doing a benefit performance. We haven’t been back to the Tohoku area in a while, so we’re really looking forward to going back and showing our support for the people there …
Aloha, “D”