On Friday, we had our first ever Japanese home stay. With total strangers. Which is sort of the point of a home stay, I suppose. Only we didn't meet our strangers through Oxfam or something like that. We met them at the bar.

The initial plan was for camping and a barbeque somewhere near Kuma. But when we got there, in the mountains about an hour from Sakawa, it was sort of drizzling, and we couldn't really find anywhere to camp and didn't feel like cooking in the rain. So we went to an izakaya for some food and to figure out a plan.

For those who don't know, an izakaya is the equivalent of an English pub, what most Canucks call a bar. It's almost always the kind of place where everybody knows your name. Of course when we head into an izakaya nobody knows our name. But everybody wants to. So they buy us drinks. Lots of drinks. Of course, this happened Friday.

Our hosts were Kenichi and his wife Tomeki. At first we told them we were driving and couldn't drink. So they bought us a small drink, to which we toasted. After some initial small talk – Kenichi is the deputy mayor, works at the golf course on weekends and his wife volunteers at the local temple – they discovered we planned on camping. "Are you kidding? Its raining and where are you going to camp anyway? You're staying at our house." I swear this is what he said. How could we argue?

We ate and drank, talked about declining birthrates and multiculturalism. Around nine we headed to the local snack bar, where Kenichi had a bottle of whiskey. Once again, for those who don't know, at snack bars customers usually pay by the bottle. The snack bar owner writes the customer's name on the bottle, and the customer drinks from his bottle until there's no more left. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Aside from whiskey bottles with peoples names scrawled on them, the snack bar owner had a karaoke machine. Luckily for us, the karaoke machine had English songs. First we sang the Beatles, then John Lennon and finally Paul McCartney. After that it was all enka, the equivalent of Anne Murray on valium.

Then the Hawaiian party came in. They weren't really Hawaiian, mind you, but they had grass skirts and flowery necklaces and stuff. So Nancy sang Kokomo by the Beach Boys and I sang Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin. And we did Hawaiian dances at the Japanese snack bar with our home stay parents until midnight. At which point it was bedtime.

Did I mention they were retired? That everyone was retired?

At the house – which was positively saturated with mothballs and dust – Kenichi showed us family pictures from the time in Canada. We ate cheese and chocolate and had a nightcap. In the morning we ate a huge Japanese style breakfast – rice, miso soup, broiled fish, fried eggs, and pickles – and headed on our way. What a nice home stay that was.