Two nights of concerts
Ok, I'm not going to write another entry like that for a while. Anyway, yesterday went fairly well. After three and a half hours of choir rehearsal in the afternoon, I met up with my friend from JCMU, Christian, at Nagoya Station, and we went to see a performance by students and faculty of the Aichi Prefectural College of Performing Arts at the Aichi Prefectural Performing Arts and Cultural Center in Sakae. The music was all excellent; the vocalists were all right, although I really enjoyed an older baritone who sang several pieces written by Sibelius in Finnish, I think, which were breathtaking. I wish that we had gotten seats closer to the stage. Maybe I'll hunt down some recordings of Sibelius when I get the chance.
The concert ran long and ended with a Tschaikovsky Serenade, which means unending endings. We got some curry at a Coco in central Sakae, then got back down to the subway, since it was going to take him a little more than an hour to get back to Hikone. Now, Christian has had a string of bad luck during the last few months, and it seemed to be in full effect last night. Since he's basically broke, living on $3 a day, having been screwed out of a scholarship by incompetent JCMU staff, I offered to pay for his train ticket; the problem began when I didn't have the foresight to break a 10,000 yen note at the curry house, so I ended up owing him the money. Unfortunately for him, as he messaged me later, he didn't get to Maibara till after the last train to Hikone had run, and didn't have enough money for a taxi back to JCMU. He still hasn't messaged me back, so I don't know what happened to him; he may in fact have used the 1,000 yen remaining in his wallet to drink his sorrows away. I hope he's all right.
So, I plan to go back tonight to see the second night of performances. There won't be any vocalists, but the program seems a robust one. I'm skipping Japanese Culture and Language now, because we haven't really learned anything in the past month and a half, and I can afford to miss one.
Oh, I figured I'd share a funny bit of Japanese culture with you. I saw a guy walking away from J Building on my way in, who was wearing a pink shirt with a black-and-white silk-screen of a man and woman kissing, with the subtitle "sugar cult." Silly Japanese men.