Tea

So much tea!!

I've been offered tea ... let's see ... five times now, formally. Coffee once. It's so hard to know what I can and can't drink here! One was Hato Mugi tea, which is ok, and I drank that (Drew thought I was crazy when I let him try it -- he did NOT like it).

Anyway, it's kind of hard to just ignore the drink once the person offering it has told you to go ahead and drink. They watch you then.... Lucky for me, my boss is also LDS, and he's the one who took me to meet my schools' principals today. Whenever it reached the point where they said to go ahead and drink, he would pull the cup closer to himself, but then divert the conversation to something outside the nearest window. It is custom in Japan to say something good about surroundings anyway, so it's natural. He didn't touch the drink cup after that initial time to move it closer to himself. So I will definitely follow his example in that, saying something polite about what I can see. (Also, my coworkers said to bring my own water bottle and keep it full and in plain sight on my desk when I actually start school.)

The weirdest I felt was at a big meeting of all the co-workers with the city council the other day. The co-worker beside me was like, "Go ahead, go ahead!" then a few minutes later she said, "Go ahead! You're not drinking!" So I had to actually explain a little that I don't drink coffee or tea. She found that fascinating though, so it wasn't too awkward.

Long story short, I'm going to have to be careful about what has tea and coffee in it.