Culture Festival, Year Two

It's that time of year again!  You may recall my post last year about the school culture festival.  Well, we started off this year's festival on Wednesday with the guest performance.  We all made our way to the cultural center in the city to see an A Capella group who are apparently kind of a big deal.  Like, they've won competitions and stuff.  Or so I'm told.  I couldn't read the information sheet we were given about them, nor could I understand them when they introduced themselves onstage.  But they were pretty cool anyway!  Here's one of their Youtube videos, which is nowhere near the quality of seeing them live:

Thursday was the student performances, but they didn't start until noon.  The schedule was full from noon right until the end of the day at 4:15, so a really early lunch was required.  I got a lift to the cultural center with one of my JTEs, and we had a really nice lunch at a cafe in the center with the Home Ec teacher.  I had a fabulous fried chicken breast that was stuffed with plum (ume) and a Japanese leafy green called shiso, as well as my first taste of natto!  Normally foreigners hate natto because it's really smelly and has a strange sticky texture; this was very unusually prepared natto, as it was neither of those things, and it was actually pretty good.  It kind of reminds me of chickpeas, I think?

The performances were pretty good.  The brass band was awesome as always, the Japanese harp club played a medley of The Mickey Mouse Club March and It's a Small World that was stuck in my head for at least 40 minutes after, and all of the first year girls did a dance together that was kind of cool.  One of the homeroom classes did a Romeo and Juliet performance where all the dudes were played by girls and all the girls were played by dudes; weird, yet mildly entertaining. 

Saturday was the main event, which meant it was a working day and I had to be at work all day.  But "work" here means "following the Japanese teacher who sits across from me (Matsui-sensei) around while she takes pictures of everything for the school newspaper" and "eat food and play games."  So the way bunkasai works at my school is thus: the third year homerooms each run some kind of food tent in the courtyard, and the first and second years do random stuff; some did performances like I said before, others run game rooms, haunted houses...  Basically anything that they can pull together in the timeframe they have (which I don't actually know).  Naturally, I had takoyaki for lunch from one of the tents because it's my favorite (I love these kids, even the ones I don't actually teach but still say hi and bye to me every day, but that wasn't really good takoyaki).  The homeroom teacher for one of the classes decided that Matsui-sensei and I deserved free food, so we got hashbrown patties that were pretty good. 

The first classroom we went to had carnival-style games.  Scooping goldfish is a very traditional Japanese festival game, so they had set up one of those games.  There was no way I was going to try that; I have a hard enough time trying to catch my fish when I have a normal net, never mind the flat paper scoops they use in this game.  Matsui-sensei went for it, though!  She managed to get one fish before her net became too saturated and broke. 

They also had a shooting game, with different value targets set up along the wall that you had to shoot a rubber band to knock down using a gun made from chopsticks and other rubber bands.  Matsui-sensei managed to knock down one of the #3 targets (#1 being the big prize and #4 being the smallest prize and therefore the largest size target).  I... got consolation candy.  I hit a #3 target on my first shot, but it didn't fall down. 

Another class (which we visited but didn't participate in) had turned the entire room into a giant board game, complete with cardboard box dice that you had to roll.  I'm not really sure what all the different spaces were, because the only one I could read was "start", but it looked really cool!

We stopped by the tea ceremony club and had tea.  It wasn't busy in there at all (there were only three people in there apart from us), so when we were done, the teacher who runs the club convinced me to go up and learn how to traditionally serve Japanese tea in a ceremony.  It was...nerve-wracking and exceedingly difficult.  You'd think, "Serving tea.  Anyone can do that, right?"  WRONG.  There are so many steps and certain ways to hold your hands and there's this cloth you have at your belt that you use to hold the kettle and you have to fold it a certain way that I could not for the life of me figure out.  My hands just don't move that way! 

I served the tea to one of the tea club members, who told me it was very good, but there's a high chance she was politely lying through her teeth.  Matsui-sensei took pictures for me, and then as we're leaving after, she says, "I was in the tea ceremony all through high school and university."  Greeeeeat.  So there was another person who was legitimately qualified to judge me.  (Not that she did.  She's super sweet and we had fun together all day, but still.)

After we'd visited all of the different activities in the classes, we hid in the air conditioning of the staff room until we had to go back out so that she could take photos of the dance performance at the end of the day (the same performance they did at the cultural center, but out in the school courtyard instead of on the stage).

And that was bunkasai 2016!