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,

Fireflies and other beautiful things

And here the follow-up to ”The Kawaii complex and other nuisances” (it's better to read that one first, in case you haven't yet)

So at the end of that week of being very, very annoyed, I happened to run out of food on Saturday evening. I should have taken a short trip to the supermarket, drive home, make food and get back to studying Japanese, and writing my research and planning some other works and, and, and. Instead I thought 'Fuck it all' and decided to take a slow evening walk through the ricefields to the convenient store. That probably was the best idea I had had all week.

It was just cool enough to be comfortable,

The Kawaii-complex and other nuisances

About two weeks ago I was really annoyed. There was a whole list of things I wanted to complain about, but between school work and dancing, simply didn't have the time to. Then, the following week, when I would have had the time to write, it suddenly felt as if there actually wasn't really that much to complain about, or rather, that maybe those things weren't so bad after all. And still I didn't write. Now it is, if I remember right, three weeks since my last entry. Three weeks after I said that I would finally have time to write more, and instead wrote less than ever.

Well, this basically means: I am fine.

But, just for the record, let me recapture:

Picture book: Notoyosakoi

It is pretty hard to describe my feelings when finally the time had arrived that I had been waiting for so long and had been prepairing for, together with about 50 others, with so much energy and time. Last weekend was Notoyosakoi and it really was amazing. Really being there and watching the teams dance, and - of course and maybe most important - dancing oneself is one of the coolest things I've done. I'm not able to describe it well enough anyways, so maybe a few pictures will at least give a tiny insight into what I experienced last weekend.

Time is running...

... and it's running fast, as if something not so nice was behind it. God thanks there seem to be mostly good things behind, around and before myself. So the time that runs for me right now is mostly exciting, fun, and interesting, though once in a while mixed with moments of tiredness when I wish for a few more quiet minutes.

But I think that after this next weekend,

Sunny Dark Day

First off, my excuse for taking so long to write still hasn't changed. I'm still extremely busy, and with Notoyosakoi, the great dancing event and our first big performance this year coming nearer and nearer it seems things are only getting worse.

And to top it all off, on Saturday I had my first really bad spell of homesickness.

I'm not really sure what set it off,

Golden Kyoto

Ahh how I love that city!
Golden Week - the Japanese accumulation of important national holidays that usually bestows them with about one completely free week - is over and so is my trip to Kyoto with flatmate and friend and fellow Japan exchange student Meiju (http://lone-finn-lost.blogspot.com/).

It was, simply, great.

ARGH * scratch scratch *

Yep. I got it. Damn. And this soon... and without even remembering touching any! There must have been some trace of it on a table or something.

What the hell I'm talking about?

Urushi allergy!

Courses and Projects

After two weeks of school it's about time I started proving I'm actually doing something here, right?

So here we go:

Yosakoi Video!

Ahhhhhh I found one after all, by using the Japanese Google!

I am 95% sure that this actually is the Yosakoi group of Takaoka Campus!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFBOvI3Btlw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ_HZ5IEiHs

A minute to breathe, thank you?

Wow, I don't even know where to start... It has been a week since my last 'real' entry – meaning not only pictures, but an actual report – and that week has been packed. One of the most important things happening was definitely the fact that I can finally use the internet at school with my own laptop. Already the week before, when I finally (after one and a half week of waiting) got my own username and password to use the school's computers, the people from the office told me that, sure, you can also use the Wifi, the 'cable free internet', with your own computer now. Wrong.