Irasshaimassääääää

The Oita Unversity hosted the University Festival from Friday until Sunday. It is like wonderland for everybody who likes to eat Japanese food, because there were so many booths run by student clubs, which sold different kinds of food: okonomiyaki, yakitori, omanju, ankodango, cookies, cakes, sweet potatoes, udon, yakisoba, and many more.

Okonomiyaki

 

Yakitori

 

"Octopus balls"

 

Ankodango

On the festival stage you could witness funny, entertaining and sometimes embarassing things: a band played, the theater club performed some unfunny comedy (the audience was completely silent), and last but not least, the highlight of the university festival - the Mister Lady contest! Guys dressed up as girls performed on the stage as if there was no tomorrow. It was hilarious! I loved it! It was so nice to see that the Japanese guys do not take themselves too seriously to goof around. They were having fun making a fool of themselves. They danced like Britney, they were "sexy", they breakdanced, they flirted with the audience. It was so entertaining ^_^

Everybody is waiting for the main event - the Mister Lady contest!

Our hostesses, ups sorry, hosts

 Pretty dress

 

 

 

On Sunday all the international students were supposed to run their own booth and sell food, which is typical for their country. We chose Kartoffelsalat mit Frikadellen - German potato salad with fried meat balls. Have you ever tried to make 200 servings of potato salad and meatballs?!

 

It was hard to estimate the amount of potatoes, bowls, meat, etc. to buy for 200 servings

 

3 out of 5 containers with potato salad and meatballs

 There were so many potatoes that I could not write my blog

On Sunday we had to set up our booth and sell that stuff. Unfortunately, right next to us there was the Korean booth. Imagine an owl sitting next to a peacock. The Germans were the owl. Not only was the Korean booth much more colorful and lively, they were also making their Korean pancakes fresh! The delicious smell, the appetizing sizzling of their pans, the hot steam coming from their cooking - the customers were all drawn away from our booth to theirs! Even our own Germans (including me) were, one after another, buying the competition's food! (It was delicious!) Haha.

 

Koreans (left) and Germans (right)

The Koreans cook their food

 The Koreans make their pancakes

 

 The Germans put their potatoes on the plates

At the end of the day we still had much food left that we could not sell. One reason was probably the constant rain. It was not good festival weather. The second reason is that Japanese just love Korean food more than western food. No, this is not just an excuse, it's a fact. The third reason was, that the Koreans just master the Japanese style of attracting customers. It goes like this: whenever you see potential customers approaching you have to attract their attention by shouting as loud as you can. "Irasshaimassääää!!! Doitsu no ryori wa ikaga desukaaaaa!!!" (Welcome! How about German food!) You have to be loud because all the other booths are also shouting for customers. And when you actually managed to fish some buyers, you have to do the cheerleader, like you were supporting your football team through the last game of the season: cheer, hop around, laugh, applauding, and scream. So you can imagine that for us Germans it was kind of hard. It felt so unnatural. Rather we looked like this:

Servicewüste Deutschland

 And the Koreans looked like this:

 

The Koreans cheering because someone decided to buy their pancake.

(These photos are not faked!)

In the end the Koreans even helped us sell our food, because they felt pity for us ^_^ They actually managed to scream-attract some customers for us. Learn from the masters...

The German team plus one Korean ^^

All in all, it was hard to sell our food. We made too much. 100 servings would have been enough. We did make some profit, but the effort of making so much potato salad (7 hours of cooking and preparing on Saturday!) was just not worth it. But we did not make any loss! Well at least not in regard to money (but manpower). It might be enough for 1 beer per person ^_^