Today I had the honor of attending one of my college friend's weddings. She was getting married to one of my friends from high school, which is still kind of weird for me. The wedding was beautiful (and felt kinda short, actually, but you won't hear ME complaining about that), the bride gorgeous, the groom handsome. They're really cute together.
It reminded me of a post I had been meaning to write, about marriages. I've spoken to my JTEs several times about this, actually. Or well, one JTE in particular. This year, he sits two seats down from me in the first year section of the staff room at my base school, so it's easier to talk to him (last year, he sat in the third year section, which is pretty much on the opposite side of the room). We talk about a lot of different things, like alcohol, students, English/Japanese grammar, and cultural differences. Since he recently got married, he was telling me also a little bit about how Japanese weddings work, which, as it turns out, is a little different from the workings of an American or Chinese wedding.
Firstly, you don't give gifts. There's no gift registry, no wrapping stuff, no buying things for the new couple. You give them cash instead. And not just like one hundred dollars or however much you would have bought a gift for them for. Oh no. My teacher was telling me you give them a few hundred dollars plus, at least, depending on how close you are. I think gifts can also be average of like, 500 or 600 dollars or something high like that. Japanese weddings, to my understanding, also don't balloon up to epic attendances, as some weddings with large families have the tendency to do (I'm pretty sure mine will be one of them, if I ever have one).
Part of the reason, I think, is due to the fact that the bride and groom usually are the ones to foot the bill for everything - and I mean EVERYTHING. Not just the reception and ceremony and food and stuff, but also the cost of flying/train-ing/transporting their guests out as well as their lodgings. CRAZY. The huge gift makes a little bit more sense.
Also, the dresses. Women usually buy a wedding dress for the ceremony, as well as a different dress for the reception. And not any cheapo dress. Oh no. It's of the same caliber as the wedding dress, from what I heard. Or sometimes they'll do the ceremony in Japanese style, with the kimono and everything, and then have a western style dress for the reception or something. Either way. They're spending loads of money on a dress they will wear once, at most twice. Perhaps it's because they don't have prom to do that on. Who knows.
I'm glad I won't be socially obligated to do that. My extended family on my mom's side alone is around 50-60 people, since that's how many people we cram into our house/will be crammed into our house the day after christmas. I told my students this and they were all like "NO FREAKING WAY" and "YOUR HOUSE IS HUGE" My dad's side also has a lot of people. And that's not even counting friends.
Thankfully, that's not something I'll need to worry about for a long time.
*
Woah, random, but I hear someone snoring through the wall. I'm not sure who it is, but wow. Wow. It's either my brother, my grandpa, or (unlikely) my grandma.
Also, I think I might die a little when I go back to okayama and it's FREEZING COLD. Being at home is making me spoiled. It was 60 degrees today, and sunny. I was able to wear just a shirt as long as I wasn't sitting in one place for a long time. Woaaaaaah.
I've missed California weather. :D
Showing posts with label festivals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label festivals. Show all posts
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
KARAOKE~~
Today... has been a long and eventful day. I feel like I've done a lot of traveling. Okayama, Kurashiki, and Yakage... all in one day.
I think I'll be staying home for a while. Yep.
Last night/this morning was all-you-can-karaoke, aka all night karaoke. For charity. We got two rooms at this karaoke place, one for English and the other for Japanese and I bounced back and forth between the two rooms for a bit before settling down into one, since I could sing *some* Japanese songs (and figured why not try) and some of the songs in the English room I didn't really know.
Or well, I could sing some Japanese if they PUT FURIGANA ON MORE KANJI. Furigana are those small hiragana characters above kanji that show you how to read it. They're kind of a huge crutch when it comes to reading Japanese, both in the good and bad sense. Good, since if you don't know how to read a kanji, you can use that and sometimes you'll be able to recognize a word once you know how it's read, and therefore, you'll know the meaning. Also good for when you're trying to sing and you get to a kanji you don't know how to read. Instead of going "... :D " you can read the furigana instead! The downside to furigana is that it's really hard to NOT read it... so you end up constantly reading just the furigana without actually learning the kanji. If the furigana gets taken away...
Destruction.
Anyways, last night, we started around 8pm and there were a good number of us. I wanna say somewhere around 10-12 people... perhaps more? But around there. And we started to sing, and around 11 to midnight, people started to leave to go to bars or catch last trains back. There was a bit of confusion on whether or not we actually had the rooms until midnight or if we could stay there later, since at first they told us midnight (since the place was kinda busy) but we went and asked and they told us we could keep one of the (larger) rooms. Fine by me. But a lot of people left by midnight. I think after that, there were maybe... seven of us left? Two more left right after that, so then there were only five of us. And then that number dropped to four. And by one or two am, there were only two of us left. We had the room until five.
At that point, we could have gone home. But where's the fun in that? It's not like we had to pay anything extra for the room - we had already paid for it. And we only paid 1500 yen, which is somewhere around the neighborhood of $15. For nine hours. And we sang it all.
Karaoke is one of my favorite things here in Japan (if you couldn't tell). It's really fun, once you get over the shyness and embarrassment of singing in front of people. Some people are AMAZING singers. There's a couple of JETs whom I can think of... and a couple of people overall who have the voices to hit them high notes in songs sung by the like of Utada Hikaru (her vocal range is amazing) and Mariah Carey. They're brilliant to listen to.
Everyone else, it's all just fun. A lot of the songs I like to sing tend to be slower... or like, R&B songs or love songs (or Disney) so sometimes if it's a larger crowd it's a bit embarrassing to sing them or I feel like it's a mood killer. Yet last night, we managed to find a ton of amazing songs, and when it went down to just the two of us... yeah, we busted out all the crazy and embarrassing songs.
We sang a huge range of stuff; we had a Goo Goo Doll power period, Train, Sugar Ray, BBMak, Ghostbusters, Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, girl power songs, heaven, raining men (which was ridiculously fun to sing)... among other things, and we ended with Queen's "We are the Champions." It felt rather fitting, considering that neither of us had dozed off during the entire marathon and we had lasted until the very end when they were gonna kick us out. Plus we still had most of our voices (though clearly, we did something wrong?)
Ahhh, in retrospect, we should have sang "Just the Two of Us" hahaha. That would have been fun.
I don't know what it is about karaoke that makes it so much fun, but it makes me really happy that karaoke is really cheap here.
I did get some sleep though. After we got kicked out at 5 am, I caught the first train home (achievement unlocked) and stupidly didn't go to sleep until 7, despite getting home around 6:40. I slept until about 9:20, so I got about an hour and a half of sleep... plus the thirtyish minutes on the train I slept that morning. So I got like, three hours today.
Then I woke up and went to Takahashi's festival, kind of. I wanted to go for longer, but I found out really last minute that my friend was performing taiko in Yakage's festival (which was like, 40 minutes from me). I was planning on showing up to that later in the day, around 12:30. But then I found out she was performing around noon, and the train I had intended on taking wouldn't get me there in time. Instead I had to take the train that was 40 minutes earlier, cutting in to my festival time. I had originally planned on chilling at the festival in Takahashi until I had to leave for my train, but since I had to shower and get ready, I didn't get out of my house until rather late; twenty minutes prior to my train. It was hard - did I stay at this festival, or go out to watch my friend?
The festival looked rather interesting too. The people who did calligraphy class were there (one of the students was the emcee for the event) and they had tables selling stuff as well as food and performances on a stage. They were really cool! I was really sad that I couldn't stay for longer. the festival was for like... health or something? I'm not entirely sure.
The other festival in Yakage was the daiyamo festival, where History Is Remembered in the form of a parade with people dressed up in period costumes. The ALTs in Yakage get all dressed up as well, so we got to see our friends in period costume and several pounds of make up.
Slowest. Parade. Ever though. They were slower than a wedding. And worse, there was no music. But it was really interesting to watch; I got several good pictures that I swear I'll get up one of these days.
We didn't stay til the end of the festival, since that would have been until approximately 4 or something and the parade still had a ways to go when we left (though, we ended up leaving around 3:10 anyways...). Instead, we stopped by kurashiki's AEON mall to grab some bread and make a daiso and subway run. Yay not having to cook tomorrow!
Ah crap, I forgot I was supposed to do the laundry with my new laundry bags. The washing machines DESTROY clothes here... so laundry bags are supposed to help with that. Also I dunno why but I cannot get my clothes to smell clean for the life of me. It's kind of concerning. I miss washing machines and driers in the states. Sigh.
But yeah. Today we also agreed that laundry, cleaning, and uhhh, studying kanji were all categorized into the "futile" category since you're always doing them, and you can't really win (though maybe at kanji you can get close... or at least think you're close). Everything else... you clean, it's nice, but then you have to keep cleaning or it gets dirty, and even if you do a little bit here and there, it's still a kind of futile task.
If only clean things weren't so nice and relatively bug free.
OH. THAT REMINDS ME. I think I'm getting better at dealing with insects. Today as I was getting ready to go out, I was getting changed and had pulled my pants from my drying room into my bedroom since there's a full length mirror there. As I went to pick up my pants, a freaking kamemushi (these potato bugs that are really really stinky if you squish them) fell from them.
And what did I do?
I didn't scream. I was surprised and I gasped... but I didn't scream. That's like, a first for me. Normally (especially before I came to Japan) all bugs terrified me. Surprises got screamed at. The girls in the dormitory next to me have heard my screams from bugs before.
I even managed to get rid of it myself, though I couldn't bring myself to kill it. I was lucky in that potato bugs aren't very fast moving, and generally don't jump at you or fly... that I've seen. So I got my broom and dustpan and coaxed it into that and then chucked it outside. If I had squashed it, a) I would have squashed it straight into my bedsheets (gross) b) it would have let out an awful smell, and c) that increased the chances that it would have moved or something.
But yeah! I got rid of the bug all by myself. Wee~
Watch, next thing you know, I'll be touching them. lols.
I think I'll be staying home for a while. Yep.
Last night/this morning was all-you-can-karaoke, aka all night karaoke. For charity. We got two rooms at this karaoke place, one for English and the other for Japanese and I bounced back and forth between the two rooms for a bit before settling down into one, since I could sing *some* Japanese songs (and figured why not try) and some of the songs in the English room I didn't really know.
Or well, I could sing some Japanese if they PUT FURIGANA ON MORE KANJI. Furigana are those small hiragana characters above kanji that show you how to read it. They're kind of a huge crutch when it comes to reading Japanese, both in the good and bad sense. Good, since if you don't know how to read a kanji, you can use that and sometimes you'll be able to recognize a word once you know how it's read, and therefore, you'll know the meaning. Also good for when you're trying to sing and you get to a kanji you don't know how to read. Instead of going "... :D " you can read the furigana instead! The downside to furigana is that it's really hard to NOT read it... so you end up constantly reading just the furigana without actually learning the kanji. If the furigana gets taken away...
Destruction.
Anyways, last night, we started around 8pm and there were a good number of us. I wanna say somewhere around 10-12 people... perhaps more? But around there. And we started to sing, and around 11 to midnight, people started to leave to go to bars or catch last trains back. There was a bit of confusion on whether or not we actually had the rooms until midnight or if we could stay there later, since at first they told us midnight (since the place was kinda busy) but we went and asked and they told us we could keep one of the (larger) rooms. Fine by me. But a lot of people left by midnight. I think after that, there were maybe... seven of us left? Two more left right after that, so then there were only five of us. And then that number dropped to four. And by one or two am, there were only two of us left. We had the room until five.
At that point, we could have gone home. But where's the fun in that? It's not like we had to pay anything extra for the room - we had already paid for it. And we only paid 1500 yen, which is somewhere around the neighborhood of $15. For nine hours. And we sang it all.
Karaoke is one of my favorite things here in Japan (if you couldn't tell). It's really fun, once you get over the shyness and embarrassment of singing in front of people. Some people are AMAZING singers. There's a couple of JETs whom I can think of... and a couple of people overall who have the voices to hit them high notes in songs sung by the like of Utada Hikaru (her vocal range is amazing) and Mariah Carey. They're brilliant to listen to.
Everyone else, it's all just fun. A lot of the songs I like to sing tend to be slower... or like, R&B songs or love songs (or Disney) so sometimes if it's a larger crowd it's a bit embarrassing to sing them or I feel like it's a mood killer. Yet last night, we managed to find a ton of amazing songs, and when it went down to just the two of us... yeah, we busted out all the crazy and embarrassing songs.
We sang a huge range of stuff; we had a Goo Goo Doll power period, Train, Sugar Ray, BBMak, Ghostbusters, Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, girl power songs, heaven, raining men (which was ridiculously fun to sing)... among other things, and we ended with Queen's "We are the Champions." It felt rather fitting, considering that neither of us had dozed off during the entire marathon and we had lasted until the very end when they were gonna kick us out. Plus we still had most of our voices (though clearly, we did something wrong?)
Ahhh, in retrospect, we should have sang "Just the Two of Us" hahaha. That would have been fun.
I don't know what it is about karaoke that makes it so much fun, but it makes me really happy that karaoke is really cheap here.
I did get some sleep though. After we got kicked out at 5 am, I caught the first train home (achievement unlocked) and stupidly didn't go to sleep until 7, despite getting home around 6:40. I slept until about 9:20, so I got about an hour and a half of sleep... plus the thirtyish minutes on the train I slept that morning. So I got like, three hours today.
Then I woke up and went to Takahashi's festival, kind of. I wanted to go for longer, but I found out really last minute that my friend was performing taiko in Yakage's festival (which was like, 40 minutes from me). I was planning on showing up to that later in the day, around 12:30. But then I found out she was performing around noon, and the train I had intended on taking wouldn't get me there in time. Instead I had to take the train that was 40 minutes earlier, cutting in to my festival time. I had originally planned on chilling at the festival in Takahashi until I had to leave for my train, but since I had to shower and get ready, I didn't get out of my house until rather late; twenty minutes prior to my train. It was hard - did I stay at this festival, or go out to watch my friend?
The festival looked rather interesting too. The people who did calligraphy class were there (one of the students was the emcee for the event) and they had tables selling stuff as well as food and performances on a stage. They were really cool! I was really sad that I couldn't stay for longer. the festival was for like... health or something? I'm not entirely sure.
The other festival in Yakage was the daiyamo festival, where History Is Remembered in the form of a parade with people dressed up in period costumes. The ALTs in Yakage get all dressed up as well, so we got to see our friends in period costume and several pounds of make up.
Slowest. Parade. Ever though. They were slower than a wedding. And worse, there was no music. But it was really interesting to watch; I got several good pictures that I swear I'll get up one of these days.
We didn't stay til the end of the festival, since that would have been until approximately 4 or something and the parade still had a ways to go when we left (though, we ended up leaving around 3:10 anyways...). Instead, we stopped by kurashiki's AEON mall to grab some bread and make a daiso and subway run. Yay not having to cook tomorrow!
Ah crap, I forgot I was supposed to do the laundry with my new laundry bags. The washing machines DESTROY clothes here... so laundry bags are supposed to help with that. Also I dunno why but I cannot get my clothes to smell clean for the life of me. It's kind of concerning. I miss washing machines and driers in the states. Sigh.
But yeah. Today we also agreed that laundry, cleaning, and uhhh, studying kanji were all categorized into the "futile" category since you're always doing them, and you can't really win (though maybe at kanji you can get close... or at least think you're close). Everything else... you clean, it's nice, but then you have to keep cleaning or it gets dirty, and even if you do a little bit here and there, it's still a kind of futile task.
If only clean things weren't so nice and relatively bug free.
OH. THAT REMINDS ME. I think I'm getting better at dealing with insects. Today as I was getting ready to go out, I was getting changed and had pulled my pants from my drying room into my bedroom since there's a full length mirror there. As I went to pick up my pants, a freaking kamemushi (these potato bugs that are really really stinky if you squish them) fell from them.
And what did I do?
I didn't scream. I was surprised and I gasped... but I didn't scream. That's like, a first for me. Normally (especially before I came to Japan) all bugs terrified me. Surprises got screamed at. The girls in the dormitory next to me have heard my screams from bugs before.
I even managed to get rid of it myself, though I couldn't bring myself to kill it. I was lucky in that potato bugs aren't very fast moving, and generally don't jump at you or fly... that I've seen. So I got my broom and dustpan and coaxed it into that and then chucked it outside. If I had squashed it, a) I would have squashed it straight into my bedsheets (gross) b) it would have let out an awful smell, and c) that increased the chances that it would have moved or something.
But yeah! I got rid of the bug all by myself. Wee~
Watch, next thing you know, I'll be touching them. lols.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Festivals festivals festivals!
This weekend is a festival weekend, for some reason. I'm going to (or will try to go to, at least) not one, not two, but THREE festivals in only two days.
Three festivals in two days?
Challenge accepted.
This first festival was today. It was my Takahashi technical high school's open festival day (there are also performances and stuff but that is usually on a weekday). They had stalls and cares and a haunted house and displays and crafts or things the students made that you could buy.
And so. Much. Food.
Once again, I purchased more food tickets than my stomach had room for, because it is so freaking hard to say no to students you actually like (and want to like you). Thankfully for my waistline, the portions were all Japanese sized (that is to say, tiny) so having two cookies and some juice meant having a small cup of milk tea (like teacup size... A small tea cup) and two cookies about the size of half dollars.
Basically, I ate my way through the whole festival, since I lack the desire to not be able to sleep at night (no おばけやすい, haunted house, for me). I could probably be coerced into that if I had a copious amount of alcohol in my system. But I was at school, so I didn't.
So what kind of food did they have at the festival? There were a lot of repeats from the other festivals...
Yuzu ice cream daifuku (ice cream wrapped in mochi)
Yuzu pound cake
Two country ma'am cookies (country ma'am is a popular cookie brand here, like nabisco)
Oden (I got set A which had daikon, or Japanese radish, konnyaku noodles, and a cabbage roll, which is just cabbage wrapped around meat. The cabbage rolls are pretty tasty. But. It had no chikuwa (fish paste) or the other things I don't like in oden! It also came with this Yuzu flavored pepper paste stuff that was AMAZING.)
Curry and rice
Milk tea
Black tea
Cold green tea
Chocolate churro
Plain churro
Kinako dango (mochi balls rolled in this peanut-y powder)
Azuki dango (red bean paste mochi balls)
Mitarashi dango (mochi flavored with a thick soy sauce and sugar sauce)
Chicken yakisoba
I ate the dango and yakisoba after I got home. But I also bought bread they had made (how could I not!) and an apple pound cake. I'm saving those for later. The bread has cheese and BACON in it. I'm excited.
Other foods they had but I didn't eat:
Frankfurter and juice (despite this being sold by one of my favorite classes, I really don't like the frankfurters here. I really want to... But every time I buy one it just turns out to be a disappointment since the casing is usually ridiculously thick).
Caramel popcorn
Zaizen (I think,that's what it's called... It's mochi in red bean soup. Not the biggest fan of red beans)
Udon
...these pancake things with custard or chocolate or red bean paste in them
And
Deep fried takoyaki (takoyaki are balls of dough with pieces of octopus in them. You should google them if you don't know what they are. But these were deep fried and the line was always at least 30 minutes... So I bought a ticket but ended up giving it to my team teaching partner instead cause I wanted to go home and work on my grad school app)
I also missed out on eating at one of the cafes. THERE WERE THREE CAFES. WHY WERE THERE THREE CAFES?! Seriously... I think they were all run by the design classes. There was one themed around Christmas (there were a lot of christmas themed things... It made me kind of sad...) run by the third years, and the second year's was called Hayabusa, after the... Space thing. They built a model of the satellite and had the movie running. It was pretty.
The one run by the first years had one of the male students (whose english is pretty okay) in a dress and long brown wig. The poor thing looked MISERABLE. Some male students wear drag and girls clothing proudly and seem to be even more excited about wearing a skit and a wig than they do in their own clothes... But this kid was a poster child for unhappiness and embarrassment. I wonder if he lost a bet or dare or rock paper scissors... Or was being punished. But their theme was a manga cafe, so they had a bunch of people,dressed up in cosplay. It was really cute.
Yeah, the design kids usually have amazing things. They also had a life sized model of the wolf from princess mononoke- the one that she rode. Like, you could ride the model if you were a small Japanese person. It was really really good.
Oh I should make a note, that here, juice is sometimes used the same way 'soft drinks' or 'pop' is used or 'cold beverage.' IE, orange juice, soda, cider, calpis, and sometimes tea are all included in this category. It still throws me off sometimes.
But yeah. That was my school festival. A lot of fun. I think the students were happy I came? They seemed excited... Especially when it came to selling me things lol.
But now I am off to an all night karaoke... For charity! ALL YOU CAN KARAOKE FOR THR CHILDREN. And tomorrow there are two festivals I will attempt... Providing I can catch the first train back, get at least an hour of sleep at the karaoke place or McD's, change, and get out the house again. One festival is on the way to the station and the other is out in Yakage. Weeeee. Full weekend go! I guess it's a good thing I basically have a holiday on Monday... I still have to go to school, but I have no c,asses. And it's my base school. So yeah. Excellent.
And I mean, I'm doing cultural things, so like... That's a good thing to be out all weekend for, yeah?
Three festivals in two days?
Challenge accepted.
This first festival was today. It was my Takahashi technical high school's open festival day (there are also performances and stuff but that is usually on a weekday). They had stalls and cares and a haunted house and displays and crafts or things the students made that you could buy.
And so. Much. Food.
Once again, I purchased more food tickets than my stomach had room for, because it is so freaking hard to say no to students you actually like (and want to like you). Thankfully for my waistline, the portions were all Japanese sized (that is to say, tiny) so having two cookies and some juice meant having a small cup of milk tea (like teacup size... A small tea cup) and two cookies about the size of half dollars.
Basically, I ate my way through the whole festival, since I lack the desire to not be able to sleep at night (no おばけやすい, haunted house, for me). I could probably be coerced into that if I had a copious amount of alcohol in my system. But I was at school, so I didn't.
So what kind of food did they have at the festival? There were a lot of repeats from the other festivals...
Yuzu ice cream daifuku (ice cream wrapped in mochi)
Yuzu pound cake
Two country ma'am cookies (country ma'am is a popular cookie brand here, like nabisco)
Oden (I got set A which had daikon, or Japanese radish, konnyaku noodles, and a cabbage roll, which is just cabbage wrapped around meat. The cabbage rolls are pretty tasty. But. It had no chikuwa (fish paste) or the other things I don't like in oden! It also came with this Yuzu flavored pepper paste stuff that was AMAZING.)
Curry and rice
Milk tea
Black tea
Cold green tea
Chocolate churro
Plain churro
Kinako dango (mochi balls rolled in this peanut-y powder)
Azuki dango (red bean paste mochi balls)
Mitarashi dango (mochi flavored with a thick soy sauce and sugar sauce)
Chicken yakisoba
I ate the dango and yakisoba after I got home. But I also bought bread they had made (how could I not!) and an apple pound cake. I'm saving those for later. The bread has cheese and BACON in it. I'm excited.
Other foods they had but I didn't eat:
Frankfurter and juice (despite this being sold by one of my favorite classes, I really don't like the frankfurters here. I really want to... But every time I buy one it just turns out to be a disappointment since the casing is usually ridiculously thick).
Caramel popcorn
Zaizen (I think,that's what it's called... It's mochi in red bean soup. Not the biggest fan of red beans)
Udon
...these pancake things with custard or chocolate or red bean paste in them
And
Deep fried takoyaki (takoyaki are balls of dough with pieces of octopus in them. You should google them if you don't know what they are. But these were deep fried and the line was always at least 30 minutes... So I bought a ticket but ended up giving it to my team teaching partner instead cause I wanted to go home and work on my grad school app)
I also missed out on eating at one of the cafes. THERE WERE THREE CAFES. WHY WERE THERE THREE CAFES?! Seriously... I think they were all run by the design classes. There was one themed around Christmas (there were a lot of christmas themed things... It made me kind of sad...) run by the third years, and the second year's was called Hayabusa, after the... Space thing. They built a model of the satellite and had the movie running. It was pretty.
The one run by the first years had one of the male students (whose english is pretty okay) in a dress and long brown wig. The poor thing looked MISERABLE. Some male students wear drag and girls clothing proudly and seem to be even more excited about wearing a skit and a wig than they do in their own clothes... But this kid was a poster child for unhappiness and embarrassment. I wonder if he lost a bet or dare or rock paper scissors... Or was being punished. But their theme was a manga cafe, so they had a bunch of people,dressed up in cosplay. It was really cute.
Yeah, the design kids usually have amazing things. They also had a life sized model of the wolf from princess mononoke- the one that she rode. Like, you could ride the model if you were a small Japanese person. It was really really good.
Oh I should make a note, that here, juice is sometimes used the same way 'soft drinks' or 'pop' is used or 'cold beverage.' IE, orange juice, soda, cider, calpis, and sometimes tea are all included in this category. It still throws me off sometimes.
But yeah. That was my school festival. A lot of fun. I think the students were happy I came? They seemed excited... Especially when it came to selling me things lol.
But now I am off to an all night karaoke... For charity! ALL YOU CAN KARAOKE FOR THR CHILDREN. And tomorrow there are two festivals I will attempt... Providing I can catch the first train back, get at least an hour of sleep at the karaoke place or McD's, change, and get out the house again. One festival is on the way to the station and the other is out in Yakage. Weeeee. Full weekend go! I guess it's a good thing I basically have a holiday on Monday... I still have to go to school, but I have no c,asses. And it's my base school. So yeah. Excellent.
And I mean, I'm doing cultural things, so like... That's a good thing to be out all weekend for, yeah?
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Hotaru Matsuri
Tonight, I went with some of the ALTs in Takahashi (and one from closer to the city) to a local firefly festival in this area of Takahshi known as Nariwa. Technically, until a couple years ago, Nariwa used to be its own town proper. Then Takahashi, giant sprawl that it is, kind of swallowed up Nariwa. But even still, a lot of the things are kind of distinct about it, and you kind of need a car to get there proper. They were holding a firefly festival along one of the riversides in this absolutely gorgeous area. I'm quite sad that I didn't have my camera on hand to capture the gorgeousness of the area; nestled between mountains, the firefly festival area is considerably more rural than where I live. There are loads of rice paddies in tiered hills with traditional style houses. There's also a river that's mostly overgrown with grass where we watched the fireflies. Some of the roads were about as wide as my friend's (tiny) Kei-car and had no guard rails and lead to a steep drop into a flooded rice paddy.
The festival itself was held at one of the middle schools (that I don't teach at). They had festival snacky foods, but I had come from my friend's birthday celebrations in Okayama city prior to this, so I wasn't super hungry. They had the usual though - takoyaki, fries, crepes, karaage, meat on a stick...
The area it was held in is also famous for this dance story thing about a monk who has his holy water stolen by demons who then transform into a giant 8-headed snake. Kagura... I think it might be called? I forget. Either way this town is famous for that, and you can find statues and other references to the dance all over the area. They performed the dance in the gym for us, and afterwards were throwing out snacks and mochi. Like, hard mochi in plastic bags. Like, potentially dangerous if you weren't paying attention and got beaned in the face by one. As it was, everyone (adults included) were scrambling to get the food so if you weren't careful, you might find yourself elbowed by a sweet looking grandma.
I actually ran into a couple of my students at the festival, and two of them hung around to talk to me in this Japanese-English kind of hybrid. It was quite fun actually, and the kids were sweet. It was really fun talking to them too, outside of school. I got to dispel the "you're with boys therefore boyfriend?" thing yet again, but this time, I explained to them that the other ALTs in Takahashi were all dudes (no joke) so that if they saw me with a guy he was FRIEND ONLY since there were lots of guys out here. Thankfully, they understood. Hopefully they will spread this to the other students so that the first years aren't constantly thinking I'm dating a bunch of different guys haha. Ha.
Anyways, the fireflies were gorgeous! I don't remember ever seeing fireflies (though I suppose it's entirely possible since we used to go to Minnesota in the summer), so I counted this as my "first firefly seeing experience."
And wow. They're absolutely gorgeous. They also stay sufficiently far away so that I don't get freaked out. There were tons along the river. Some floated high in the air, their lights easy to see against the backdrop of the forest-covered mountain/hills. Others floated just off the road, making it slightly dangerous for those who were trying to catch them. It was so serene though; we were in an area with not many people, so it was really quiet, and you could just hear nature all around you. It was in a super rural area, so there were little to no lights around to compete with the fireflies (though the moon was pretty bright).
Absolute gorgeousness. I can see why they put a level like this into Katamari, and how well it's paired with the music on that level.
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