This week was the week before our school's ぶんかさい (bunka sai), or culture festival. They're a really big deal here so the world pretty much stopped for it. On Friday, the school had a huge gathering to celebrate the high school's 30-year-anniversary. The entire day was set aside for all of the students to sit in the gym for the day and listen to various speeches and presentations. Fun stuff. We (the students) have been practicing a Beethoven song for the past month so that we could sing it at this thing in front of the school board.
Anyway, the day of this anniversary, everyone had to wear their entire winter uniform (jacket too). If it hadn't recently started getting cooler out I would have protested, but it wasn't too bad. Which reminds me, you haven't seen the winter uniform.
Everyone already knew where to sit from our 2-hour practice the day before. Once we were all seated, the school board's members arrived and started to sit down. When they first started walking in and we all started clapping I was like, "cool, normal. Clapping." But after a good minute of straight clapping it just started sounding awkward to me. I'm assuming we clapped for so long to show our respect. That went on for a good two minutes, after which we bowed and sat down. Thus followed a slew of short speeches, introductions, and lots of Japanese that I couldn't understand. Seeing as the whole first half took 3 hours, I spent a lot of the time sleeping. Surpringly enough, it was okay to sleep sitting up. Not too sure why; I would've thought it'd be considered rude but I wasn't complaining. That day I became a master at sleeping in the most uncomfortable positions ever. Sleeping while sitting in a metal chair is anything but a comfy bed. You either rest your head on your chest (PLUS I was afraid that if I slouched I'd get yelled at, so I had to slep sitting up straight), or somehow rest it to the side. The latter was painful for me so I stuck with resting my head on my chest. After about a half hour of sleeping, I would wake up, listen for about five minutes, get bored, and go back to sleep. Longest 6 hours of my life. e____e Makes for a good story, though, so looking back I don't mind.
Saturday was so busy I can't even. Since Saturday was the day before the festival, I literally spent the entire day at school preparing. From 8:30 in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, we were there practicing and setting up. These kids are ridiculously motivated, it's incredible. No one complains, no one gets annoyed. Everyone ENJOYS it. It's really nice, actually. And it made staying there so late much easier.
We didn't get much relief that night, however. Since our play was at about 9 the next morning, we had to get to school 5 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING to get ready. Dead. For real, I was dead this morning. I woke up at 4:25 and somehow made it out the door by 4:40. I'm still exhausted. The play went exceptionally well. Pretty much everyone cried. Everyone was really stressed about the whole thing and I think it built up so much anticipation that when it was all finally over, the figurative rubber band snapped and all of these emotions came pouring out.
After the play everyone was allowed to watch the other performances and walk around the school to see what each class had done for the festival. Basically all of the classes are open to the public (whoever comes to the festival) and most (if not all) serve food and have desks set up as tables. It's all very organized and you can tell every class put a lot into decorating and preparing everything. And the food's delicious, which is always a plus.
I met three ALTs (assistant language teachers) that were at the festival because they knew the kids at school and felt like paying a visit. One from Chicago (HOLLA), South Africa (awesome accent), and Canadia. All three were super nice, and, as it usually is when I can find someone who speaks decent English, it was nice to talk to them. People who understood sarcasm FKSENHLKFMEAOFJ so exciting! There were many laughs and even though they were all at least six years older than me (DUDE six years older than me is 23!) they were really nice.
After the festival the entire class went out to eat to celebrate the performance, but mostly to say good bye to one of the boys in our class because he's moving away on Wednesday. Considering that these people have been together for a year and a half (their classes didn't change this year), this was a huge deal for everyone, and if most people cried after the play, EVERYONE cried about this. Including a lot of the boys. Tonight was the first time any of the boys in the class and I actually exchanged words (very few, but they meant a lot to me, as cheesy as it sounds). Huzzah! A breakthrough!
And now that this is done, I'm going to sweet, sweet sleep. Going on 19 hours awake and I'm so. Tired. Sorry for the boring post, hopefully I'll get a chance to take more pictures soon. All of the pictures I took today were public embarrassments to the people in them (all very ridiculous poses and face; good blackmail ;P).
-Ellie
P.S. OH! Carlos, if you're reading this, I finally ate Melon Bread!
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