The School Fest and the Sea

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been a while since I put anything up on here, but you know how school can be sometimes, especially when they even book up your weekends (argh!). So this past weekend was our college's school festival, which was an experience, I guess. To be quite honest, it was a bit lacking compared to the festival I'd pictured in my imagination, but I'm at least glad I went. The festival itself consisted of about 8 or 10 food stalls, all manned by different clubs at the school, a stage where they had a clown, a dating game show sort of thing, and a dancing group from the college who call themselves The Shakeys (my friend Harumi is one of them). There was also a flea market (which consisted of one table of used shirts for sale), a nail salon (which consisted of one table where a lady had brought out all her personal nail polishes and would paint your nails for $5), a bubble area and a balloon game for kids, and a deceptive, darkened hallway that I expected to be a homemade haunted house, but was, in fact, nothing but a darkened hallway. Me and one of the other exchange girls, Katy, went and watched the clown, pretended to help at the flea market, watched the Shakeys and ate and talked up on the roof for a while and then finally left. One thing that was a bit unexpected was the number of guys at the festival, both as spectators and as helpers. It would appear that an all boys school was enlisted to help out, so they were doing all the grunt work while the girls made cotton candy. And of course, my school being the 'princess' school where all the pretty rich girls go, there were lots of guys who came buy to look around. As far as the food, which was more or less the main thing at the festival, they had hot dogs (which I tried, hoping for a taste from home and being sorely disappointed with a weiner with no flavor), yakitori (like chicken kabobs), pork kimchi, tako-something (octopus squashed between to wafers, takoyaki (fried octopus balls similar to hushpuppies), cotton candy and a very suspicious booth decorated with American newspapers and pictures of Obama that I wasn't sure what they served (I thing egg with something). So, that was that.

In other news, my host brother took me and his girlfriend and my host dog, Machi, to this Seaside park way the heck out by Odaiba in the bay and I got to see the sea. Thus, the word of the day is Umi (sea). At the park, despite it being a weekday, there were men fishing, lots of young families with their kids, a bunch of skateboarders (they had a special section of the park), and a few couples. More numerous than anything though, were people with their dogs. Because Machi loves me best (or so I'm told), I was brought along to try to keep him calm in the car, and the park has a special dog park within it where you sign a waiver and then you let your dog loose inside to run and frolic as he likes. However. Machi is a bit of a scaredy cat and would follow one step behind me wherever I went, so to get any exercise in him, I had to run around too. When he was feeling especially brave, he would crawl in between my legs and bark at other dogs. It was a lot of fun though, watching all the different kinds of dogs having a good old time. Once that was over and we were cold (it's cold here now, btw), we walked to the other end of the park and onto the beach to show Machi the sea for the first time. He didn't see what all the hoopla was about, I don't think. After that, we all piled back in the car and my host brother took us home a different way, I think to give me a good tour of the city, because we drove beside the Odaiba ferris wheel, right by the Fuji TV building, took the Rainbow Bridge directly to Tokyo Tower, then veered towards Roppongi Hills (which is right next to the TV Asahi studio), and then back to Shibuya from there. It was also my host mom's birthday and we had a nice cake and tea with her when we got home. So anyways, I suppose that's all the news to report for now. I'm still wanting to strangle my school people and am working hard to let all the piddly little crap they do to make my life heck, go. So, we'll see about that. Tomorrow I think I'm going to some island called Enoshima with a friend from school. So, I'll have to let you know how that turns out. I'll upload some pictures to my photobucket tonight so you'll have something new to peruse. Talk to you cats later!

(Oh, I also forgot to mention that I went to Futako-Tamagawa [a stop on my train line] on my birthday where I proceeded to fall into a mud puddle and make a fool of myself. Even so, it was an utterly beautiful place, on the Tamagawa river, and no doubt you've seen it in tons of Jdramas, usually when to people are riding a bike at sunset by the river. I've uploaded pictures of that too)