Serving the community for a bottle of tea

I volunteered to help my friend today with a class he runs ... it was never explained to be what exactly the class was for and even afterward I can't describe it with any confidence. I thought it was a group of people training to be tour guides in Hakodate. That would be consistent with the theme of the class to interview people from different national backgrounds on their thoughts about Hakodate and Hokkaido in general. However, many of the interviewers were Chinese and the age range was so massive that I can't believe that some of the older people were in training for a job. My best guess is that this was a class to prepare for taking a tour guide test, which is more of a hobby for bored housewives/old people than of any practical use.

There were four guests to the class. One representative of Korea, two people from China, and myself from England & America. We did short self-introductions to the class in Japanese and then for 10 minutes the students prepared some questions to ask each of us. We were each assigned a group (the Chinese couple were together) and did a 20 minute conversation session before rotating. My friend is Japanese but was born and partially raised in the United States. he was my interpreter for the questions I couldn't understand (most of them). The Korean man and Chinese couple had lived in Japan long enough to get by on their own.

I was anticipating questions such as "what kind of places do you think a tourist from [insert Western country] would find interesting/cool in Hakodate?" and "What do people abroad think of when they think about Hakodate/Hokkaido?" Granted, I did get one or two questions like this from each group but for the most part it was entirely focused on me. This led to strange follow-up questions like "Since all British people are vegetarians, what kind of food do they eat when they come to Hakodate?" ... I'm a vegetarian, I'm British, therefore . . .

In my first group, the last 5 minutes were spent with one Chinese woman asking details about my personal life and trying to set up a date. Perhaps more to come on that later.

In the end it was a fun if a little unusual experience and hopefully none of my statements about my town in Hokkaido will come back to haunt me.