December 2011

It has been a long time since my last entry, and of course by now I have already been back home for two months. Japan lies behind me, strange as it seems, 10 months gone, and it was such a short time in hindsight. But I will try to put together what happened in the last two months before I left Takaoka and returned home, starting with December of last year.

Finished courses and unfinished business II

Once again another quarter of a year is over, as are the two courses I took for the time.

I did not get the work ready now either, but this time I can at least say for my own defense, that I was the fastest of the class at least when it came to the 'Raden' course, the mother-of-pearl inlay.

For that course we had to use two different techniques.

Of Deer Meat, Realism and a Not-So-Red Kyoto

(Just noticed this one got really long... sorry!)

Time for another blog! In my last one I was just about to leave for Nara with my class and the trip turned out great! They are great people and we had a lot of fun, though at a point I overreacted a bit to certain things... I think they have forgiven me until now though, but let's start from the beginning!

The main reason we went to Nara in the first place was because of the yearly Shousou-in exhibition that is held only once a year every autumn for two weeks to show some of Japans most important cultural heritage.

Celebrating Creativity

There it came and there it went: Soukisai, Takaoka Campus' school festival. And with it the visit of three friends from Finland, who are at the moment as exchange students in Tokyo. With it also my last dance. The thing that maybe shocks me most is that it seems just such a short time ago that I saw TNC dancing on the school yard in my second week here and decided to join. Now it's been almost seven months and only three left. I catch myself at counting 'last times'

Bliss in Red and Gold

Oh the Japanese autumn... the last weeks have been brilliant! I would even go as far as to say this might turn out to be the happiest time for me here in Japan. Right after the Jazz Street weekend in Kanazawa - which was great, by the way; lot's of great music and a short trip to the city's old Geisha quarter as well – a taifun from the south touched on Toyama-prefecture as well, and after that the heat of summer finally broke for good. In the last three weeks

Finished courses and unfinished business, Part II

Courses starting from June until end of August,

Finished courses and unfinished business, Part I

Before I tell about my travels with my mum、 I need to update something I should have done a long time ago but somehow always pushed off. Now that the second semester of school is already about to start, I think it really is about time to tell you what I've done in school until now:

First the courses until June,

Happy on Holidays

The week after Yosakoi Toyama I was pretty much out of energy for anything but still went to school trying to get some more urushi stuff done but, as expected, not much came out of it. Tuesday night was the big yosakoi 'It's Over!' party from our team which I spent observing the mysterious Japanese as they went absolutely crazy. It's pretty funny actually. I can't believe they really are so weak against alcohol that they would start making such a rucus after one only lightly alcoholic cocktail. I rather think after being under so many rules most of the time in their life, at the slightest chance of letting go a bit, they do just that, as effectively as I've hardly seen anybody let go before. The noise level was amazing!

High on Dance (part II)

continued from High on Dance (part I)

Well, having made that decision still left Yosakoi Toyama right in front of me. With a schedule that made me wonder whom I might be able to kill for planning it out. On Saturday we would be dancing 8 times. Three times of those would be loop-parades with 3 continous dances each, which made alltogether 14 times dancing the full choreography in a time frame of 8 hours. The most 'interesting' part of that was that we would be dancing basic parade/loop parade/basic parade/loop parade directly in a row with only about 10 to 15 minutes break after each dance. Our song is about 4 minutes 20 seconds, therefore 3 times loop makes about 13 minutes of continuous dancing (and that times two, plus two more single parade... ARGH!). Nice eh?

I was a bit scared.

High on Dance (part I)

written on 14.08.2011

(this one's really long, so there's two parts!)

It is Sunday evening, exactly one week after Yosakoi Toyama, the biggest Yosakoi event around here and the biggest Yosakoi event every year for TNC, our school's group. For 3 weekends before that there had been a festival we were dancing at every single weekend, and weekly 7 more hours of training. That, together with the last weeks of school for this term before the summer holidays should be a pretty understandable reason I was seriously waiting for it to come and be over.

Since even before the first of these four festivals I had started to have problems with my knees, too – just basically overworked them after having done no sports whatsoever for years before – so, it wasn't easy.

I was getting better at it,