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,