[TheMercenary]

Good Sake rocks.... That is all.

My most memorable Sake experience was when we hosted a large rugby club from Nippon in Hawaii. There were at least 40 or 50 people, which included spouses and children. Of all of those people were about 3 who could speak a tiny bit of English. We had a memorable match, but that is another story, and afterwards my wife loaded as many of them into our VW Vanagon and her Open top CJ-7 and drove to the party. Well the principles showed up with 3 kegs of sake. Not little things, these were like 50 gallon barrels. They had elaborate speeches, all in Japanese, so of course we had no freaking clue what they were saying but I am sure it was all good because we were showing them a grand time. They were dressed in these elaborate outfits, and cracked open the Sake kegs with big wooden mallets. Then they passed out these square wooden cups, which I still have, and we were all ladled out gobs of Sake which we drank until we were sufficiently trashed. Great experience. We had a great time with that bunch and still couldn't really talk with each other.

Many years later, 2 years ago, we had three visiting Japanese Rugby Refs come over on an exchange. We took great care of them and I am sure did more for our relations than Bush ever did after he threw up in the Presidents lap.