G8 Notebook: Leaders meet inside; outside, tea is served

TOYAKO, Japan (Reuters) - While leaders of the world's rich nations negotiated in a luxury resort on Monday over how to resolve the world's woes, outside life went on, if not as usual then at least pretty much as planned.

AN AMUSING AFTERNOON

First ladies had fun with tea, sweets and kimono as their husbands attended the summit even if their events were a little more low-key than they would have been had the eye-catching Carla Bruni, wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, attended.

Japan's first lady, Kiyoko Fukuda, dressed in a blue kimono, performed a traditional tea ceremony, whipping bitter green tea with a short bamboo whisk and serving sweets made of arrowroot starch.

The wives, including U.S. first lady Laura Bush and Britain's Sarah Brown, giggled as they made tea of their own and served each other, awkwardly bowing and rotating the cups.

They also watched a Japanese model being dressed in a layered and extremely heavy "junihitoe" kimono, usually reserved for royalty.

Japan had been disappointed to hear that Bruni, a singer and former model, wouldn't be coming to Hokkaido.

But she wasn't the only no-show -- the spouses of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi also elected not to attend.

LOCAL TASTES

As the G8 leaders rolled up their sleeves and got down to some serious negotiations, so too did the area's chefs, challenged to please the palates of the eight and spouses, not to mention feed the thousands of officials, media and security folks who swirl around such events.

The menus for the VIPs have focused on local ingredients including hairy crab (for Monday night's bisque), asparagus, lamb, all manner of vegetables and "wild leaves from around here". And of course regional sake rice wine.

FOGGY FOGGY NIGHT

While inside the hotel G8 leaders were trying to find clarity on some of world's most complex problems -- soaring oil and food prices, global inflation, African politics and climate change -- outside, a thick fog was building.

High atop a mountain in northern Hokkaido, the luxury resort housing the summit was by the time of the evening's festivities shrouded in fog.

Still, the leaders shrugged off indoor seats in front of a wall of windows and stepped out onto the hotel patio to watch traditional Japanese dances and a fireworks display under a steady drizzle and with minimal visibility.

MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHO YOU ARE

What do world leaders wish for when they make a wish? G8 leaders were invited to give it a try as part of the Japanese "tanabata" celebration coinciding with their summit.

The leaders wrote a wish on a piece of paper and tied it to a bamboo tree in a ritual based on a Japanese myth of two star-crossed lovers condemned to meet only once a year in the Milky Way, on July 7.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's wish, on the third anniversary of the bombing of London, sought an end to poverty and an end to terrorism.

U.S. President George W. Bush also took a global theme, asking for "a world free from tyranny".

IT'S GOOD TO BE THE KING

G8 leaders and their wives were presented with vermillion lacquerware sake cups, adorned with a gold mountain cherry blossom and inscribed in gold with their initials, as summit souvenirs.

The $1,000 cups were made in Wajima, central Japan, a city famous for the craft that was hit hard by an earthquake last year.

Fukuda and his wife selected the cups, each made by more than 10 craftsmen in a painstaking process that takes up to a year, as symbolic of a summit where global warming is high on the agenda.

"Making these doesn't use any modern form of energy, so they are environmentally friendly," said Masanori Okagaki, president of the Wakima Lacquerware Commerce and Industry Cooperative Society.

(Reporting by Yoko Nishikawa, Jeremy Pelofsky, Linda Sieg and Chisa Fujioka)