Kekkon shi ma senga?

Picture this...a 17 yearold New Zealand boy sitting on the train, in Kyoto, with an old man-looking hat (that he bought at some tourist joint for $30 yesterday). He is sitting beside a Japanese 70-ish looking woman who is chatting and laughing with her friend. She smiles at the boy, and then the boy looks at her and says in Japanese " will you marry me?" (kekkon shi ma senga?). She looks at him weird so he continues....in japanese "I think we would be good together". She laughs at then the train stops, and as both of them are getting off, he says to her..in japanese..."i`ll call you". Wow. good laughs. I probably shouldn:t encourage it, but i did. The phrasebook the boy bought has some very inappropriate things for teenagers to say.....but its good fun.

So today we did some sightseeing in Kyoto and then had a 4 hour farewell party where we were clapped at when we walked in, then taken ontto the stage, then we had to speak into a microphone and do an impromptu speech, then they served us buffet type food, we pounded rice cake mush with a massive mallet as people chanted something, then the students played taiko drums on stage, then had to do another speech they had written, then we were clapped at like royalty as we left. In between all of that the students were celebrities....everybody wanted pictures with them. Girls were swooning over the boys....it was insane.

Funniest part of today, besides the teenager proposing to a grandmother:
We were on one of eleven escalators in Kyoto station ( a place that has a department store with 11 floors of stuff). So Kathryn and Hogan are discussing filth and debating whether they would rather lick a toilet seat or a handrail on an escalator. Kathryn insisted that she would rather lick a toilet seat because they get cleaned more often, and escalators have so many people touch them and just keep circulating again and again. She insisted that escalators NEVER get cleaned. Just as she finishes her speech on hygiene, a man in a uniform goes past her the other way on the escalator who is cleaning the escalator. Seriously, he (and his 3 other co-workers) were actually escalator cleaners. It was perfect timing, she almost peed her pants she was laughing so hard. It was great. Only in japan will they clean an escalator, and develop the Kyoto protocol to make the planet cleaner, but where they demand that you sweat in other peoples volleyball shoes.....