Sometimes the universe is just waiting for the perfect moment.
I must send Eri-manager and her fellow GEOS-manager friend cakes of happy!! CAKES OF BLISS AND JOYSPARKLES! But I shall tell the story chronologically.
Last weekend: tickets to L'Arc~en~Ciel's 15th anniversary concert went on sale. Laura and I, despite misusing GEOS resources and enlisting pretty much everyone who works at our school (the largest in central Japan) for a good while, utterly failed to get tickets before they sold out. I spent the rest of the weekend being sad and sleepy.
Last week: a regular work week. Today is Culture Day and thus a national holiday, so I had off work. :) We were thinking about going exploring some in Nagoya, but then my students informed me that Gifu University was having a festival and I should go see it. I quite agreed, so plans were changed accordingly!
Today: I slept until an entirely satisfactory but not annoyingly late time, then dressed in NOT-suit clothes (a luxury!) (I think I'm developing an even odder sense of style due to the fact that I get stared at everywhere no matter what I'm wearing, so it doesn't actually change anything). Laura and I set out on bicycles into the truly gorgeous day that today was, with only a general idea of where the university was and a supreme disregard for whether or not we actually got there. Did I mention lovely weather? Also, Gifu is lovely. The university is on the outskirts of Gifu, near the mountains and surrounded by lovely scenic persimmon orchards and fields of fluffy-looking plants and flowers (also a scummy river, but hey, it adds character). Just when the thought of beginning to care whether or not we were heading anywhere towards the university started to creep in, Laura's cell phone rang....it was Eri....her friend who used to work in the music industry got us tickets.....YAY HUGS OF HAPPY TICKETS CONCERT IN TOKYO DOME I CAN GOOOOOOO!!! NOVEMBER 26th! I'M SO EXCITED! Which I imagine you figured out from the caps lock. But I figured redundancy is fun. Anyway.
We joyfully and mostly randomly decided that a set of white buildings must be the university and rode towards it. Turns out our unfailingly bad senses of direction failed at badness (i.e. it actually WAS the university). We found the university, and then just as we were beginning to wonder where on campus the festival was, we ran into my student who originally told me about it and just happened to be wandering around a random part of the campus (not so unlikely; he's a professor of mechanical engineering there) who told us where to go. The rest was just...Japan. I love this place. There were a bunch of stalls run by university students selling food and all kinds of other stuff (I got a nice stripey maroon sweater and star earrings for cheap!). Random people tried to speak English at us in a cute look!-I-wanna-make-the-gaijin-feel-welcome! kind of way and one stand gave us free yakitori because they'd never seen blonde people before. It was generally adorable. There was also a stage (decorated with stars and labeled with the festival's name: はんど ｉｎ はんど = hand in hand) with university-student jrock bands playing all day. They were all quite good! One of them was a ska band, and talked a good deal about how they were wearing suits in between songs.
is where the stage was.
We failed utterly to get lost on the way home, bought ice cream, then spent the evening eating omelettes and ice cream and drinking tea and looking at kittens online with Rachel.
Last weekend: tickets to L'Arc~en~Ciel's 15th anniversary concert went on sale. Laura and I, despite misusing GEOS resources and enlisting pretty much everyone who works at our school (the largest in central Japan) for a good while, utterly failed to get tickets before they sold out. I spent the rest of the weekend being sad and sleepy.
Last week: a regular work week. Today is Culture Day and thus a national holiday, so I had off work. :) We were thinking about going exploring some in Nagoya, but then my students informed me that Gifu University was having a festival and I should go see it. I quite agreed, so plans were changed accordingly!
Today: I slept until an entirely satisfactory but not annoyingly late time, then dressed in NOT-suit clothes (a luxury!) (I think I'm developing an even odder sense of style due to the fact that I get stared at everywhere no matter what I'm wearing, so it doesn't actually change anything). Laura and I set out on bicycles into the truly gorgeous day that today was, with only a general idea of where the university was and a supreme disregard for whether or not we actually got there. Did I mention lovely weather? Also, Gifu is lovely. The university is on the outskirts of Gifu, near the mountains and surrounded by lovely scenic persimmon orchards and fields of fluffy-looking plants and flowers (also a scummy river, but hey, it adds character). Just when the thought of beginning to care whether or not we were heading anywhere towards the university started to creep in, Laura's cell phone rang....it was Eri....her friend who used to work in the music industry got us tickets.....YAY HUGS OF HAPPY TICKETS CONCERT IN TOKYO DOME I CAN GOOOOOOO!!! NOVEMBER 26th! I'M SO EXCITED! Which I imagine you figured out from the caps lock. But I figured redundancy is fun. Anyway.
We joyfully and mostly randomly decided that a set of white buildings must be the university and rode towards it. Turns out our unfailingly bad senses of direction failed at badness (i.e. it actually WAS the university). We found the university, and then just as we were beginning to wonder where on campus the festival was, we ran into my student who originally told me about it and just happened to be wandering around a random part of the campus (not so unlikely; he's a professor of mechanical engineering there) who told us where to go. The rest was just...Japan. I love this place. There were a bunch of stalls run by university students selling food and all kinds of other stuff (I got a nice stripey maroon sweater and star earrings for cheap!). Random people tried to speak English at us in a cute look!-I-wanna-make-the-gaijin-feel-welcome! kind of way and one stand gave us free yakitori because they'd never seen blonde people before. It was generally adorable. There was also a stage (decorated with stars and labeled with the festival's name: はんど ｉｎ はんど = hand in hand) with university-student jrock bands playing all day. They were all quite good! One of them was a ska band, and talked a good deal about how they were wearing suits in between songs.
is where the stage was.
We failed utterly to get lost on the way home, bought ice cream, then spent the evening eating omelettes and ice cream and drinking tea and looking at kittens online with Rachel.