Bunkasei

Today was the culture festival of my high school over here. It took up pretty much the entire week in preparation, just like the sports festival. Each class transformed their classroom into some sort of exhibition of Japanese culture. Or at least, that's what the school intended. Instead, each class just sort of did stuff they thought was cool and went on from there. My class' theme was "time travel" and "illusions & trick images". But uh, the time travel was really just HEY LOOK AT OLD THINGS and the illusions were mostly MC Escher paintings and woodcuts.

Other classes had a bunch of signs up telling people to check out their rooms. One poster said "Let's Balloon House!" and I thought to myself, "yeah, that sounds like a good idea. We should balloon house." It was actually a pretty rad setup. There were nets on the doors to the room, and a ton of balloons filling up the room. There was such a ridiculous amount in there, they came up to about my chest. I asked someone how many balloons they put into the room; six thousand. SIX THOUSAND.

Some other classes also had a wedding dress made out of tissue paper, some candy, and Spiderman 3 (best movie ever). The school also put on a bunch of performances and stuff, including some plays and music stuff. The school's brass band was really damn good. I remember someone coming up and saying "Oh hey come check out the band, we're number one in Nagasaki prefecture," but I was all "Listen, son, I've studied under Nicholas Nigel Gerard Gooch 'Momma Mia' Mariconda. Get your fool self out of here with your sub-standard trash out of here before you embarrass yourself any more," and with that, he bowed his head in shame and left the room. But seriously though, the band was ridiculously good. They played a bunch of cool charts and a couple of the students played some pretty good solos, which reminded me of how much I need to practice and that I hadn't really since I got here.

Also, there was a dude with no arms. Or at least, no real arms. He had these two plastic arms, one with a hand and the other with a manipulateable claw. I didn't understand anything he said, because he was talking in Japanese, but from the pictures he was showing, I guessed he was hit by a car or something. I figure that usually people who have horrible stuff happen to them and then talk about it at schools are grumpy or have a mission or something, but this guy seemed pretty peppy. He also kept taking his arms out of his plastic arms and it kind of creeped me out. He also did a huge calligraphy painting for the school, which was pretty cool. However, how awesome that might sound, I actually have seen something even more mind-blowing. In Taiwan I saw some dude painting fans by holding the brush in his mouth, because he was completely armless. And it wasn't even just coloring and junk, it was quality decorative painting. Sorry fake-arm dude, but armless painter man takes the cake on this one.

But yeah, anyway. The different themes of the classes were pretty interesting. The Interact Club (a Rotary-related club whose meetings I attend because, uh, they tell me to. I don't understand anything at those meetings either) had a nice display of their mission and some of the awards they've received (a ton), and other clubs did some good stuff too.

Like look at this. This is the program for the school festival. Oh look! ESS (English Speaking Society. More like "Everyone Freezes Up When I Speak English To Them Society") has "Global Warming" as their theme. You can see my class, 1EI, up at the top with "Taimu Turaberu" as the theme. And there are a few other things and uh.....oh.......oh my...
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO DAMN YOU DISNEY
DAMN YOU ZAC EFRON
DAMN YOU VANESSA HUDGEONS