The concert was in Yokohama, which is a very pretty city by the bay. We didn't bother with sightseeing or anything though, we headed straight for the arena. We were the only whities there, it was kind of funny. One girl starting talking to us, it seemed as if she thought she knew me from somewhere but then got really flustered about speaking English so I don't really know. We bought penlights!
Every song has hand movements you have to do in time with the song (called furi), which looks really pretty when everyone is doing it in time together with their penlights on. The HSJ furi is incredibly complicated so we weren't exactly in time with everyone else, but it was still fun. HSJ used to be back-up dancers for Arashi and they were very cute and fluffy like this:
Now they are in their 20s and going for a sexy image, which is hard when they're all a bit gangly and awkward, especially Chinen (the one in the middle row on the far left above), who was the cutest and fluffiest but has now hit puberty and nobody has told him he's no longer cute or fluffy.
Now that they are older, the only one who's really blossomed into a pretty swan is Yamada (centre, front). It's pretty much the Yamada Show now, with the rest as glorified back-up dancers. At one point he actually tried to push Chinen off the stage. Anyway, it was pretty funny and nobody even knows the names of the rest of them anyway. We only knew two songs but there was lots of aerial acrobatics and costume changes and pyrotechnics. The highlight was definitely "Boku wa vampire" (I am a vampire), featuring spurting flames and Yamada rising out of a coffin and whatnot. Definitely worth 3000 yen.
After school Tuesday, I met up with Kathryn to get the rice cooker, shelves and really long internet cord off the chick from craigslist. The stuff was incredibly cheap but the chick had put the shelves just in a plastic bag and the metal rods kept poking through and falling out so it was a bit of a pain but we managed to get it all home and now we have organised cupboards and internet that we don't have to contort into weird positions to use. And rice!
The next few days I mostly just slept and studied, as I was feeling pretty horrible, feverish and queasy. I have a 3 page essay due every Friday and usually I leave it til the last minute and have to do it Thursday night while Arashi is on, which is a big fat pain in the butt, so I wanted to get it over with. The actual writing the essay part is fine, but the teacher gives you the sheets of paper to write the essay on, and the paper has those little boxes that you have to write in. This is supposed to help you write your kanji nicer or something, I dunno, but it's really annoying if you miss out a character or want to add or delete something, because then you have to erase everything and do it over. You can't even really write a draft copy on normal paper because then you don't know if it's the right length. I'm getting better at it though, the first essay I got a B on, but the second I got an A+, yay me! This week's was on something that has changed in your country and so I wrote it on how people don't have manners anymore, lol. Next week's is on something you can't decide about, so I'm going to do it on whether or not I should change Nino as my favourite in Arashi. I think I might do all my essays on Arashi from now on, because I have many strong opinions.
I had a kanji test on Friday, which with everything else and feeling sick, I'd hardly studied for, but managed to scrape through with 2.5% to spare, yay me! Now that I am getting better at talking and listening, kanji is definitely my weakest area.
We were going to go to the Asagaya drinking festival thing on Saturday night, but decided to go Friday instead so we wouldn't miss Arashi. Asagaya is this cute, tiny little suburb with windy streets and bars. For the drinking festival thing, you paid 4000 yen and got a free drink at 60 different bars, but there were at least twice as many that weren't participating. It was very fun and we met lots of amusing people, who we took photos of doing Lola pose. For those of you lucky enough not to know, this is Lola.
She's basically this chick who appears on variety shows and sets the women's rights movement in Japan back about 50 years. Well, to be honest, most chicks who appear on Japanese TV do. Lola has a very screechy voice and acts like she doesn't understand Japanese because she's a foreigner, even though she was brought up here, and she always makes these stupid poses like the one pictured above. It was funny because all these guys who were like "oooh I'm so indie rock" in these bars could immediately do Lola pose when we told them to. It's bad though because lately Kathryn and I have been doing Lola pose to be funny, but it's going to end up like when we started saying "totes" all the time to be funny and now we just do it without thinking.
Anyway, it was a fun night but we probably should've stopped after about bar #10. It was hard too because some places only had cocktails or spirits, so we had to mix our drinks badly. Before we started we drank this stuff called "ukon no chikara" which is supposed to stop you from getting a hangover, but it didn't. We missed the last train home Friday night because it left at like 11.30, so we caught the first train back and then slept all day Saturday. I woke up for a bit in the afternoon, then napped again and woke up again to watch Arashi and order pizza.
Today I wrote my speech for the Japanese speech contest. It's still just a rough draft and very cheesey, and to be honest I'm terrified of both public speaking and speaking in Japanese, so I'm not sure how it will go, but you can win like 100,000 yen in gift cards or vouchers or something so I'll give it a go. You're supposed to get people to help you with the grammar and pronunciation and so forth, but so far they haven't been really big with the details, so I don't know.
Anyway, this week is midterms and then Lynne gets here. For the next 3 or 4 weekends I'll be super busy but it should be good. Yay, let's do fun stuff!!!
Was it this week went to HSJ? I thought it was at least 2 weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteTime is moving at strange rates lately, like that episode of Buffy when the nerds are trying to attack her. If I get stuck in a retail job serving the same customer over and over, please shoot me.
Deleteok, in the second HSJ picture, the guy right in the middle looks like someone's Mum.
ReplyDeleteLOL, so does the guy second from the left in the back. He was super camp too.
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