Golden week final days and beyond

The final days of golden week wrapped up the essential sightseeing for the trip. We stayed at a youth hostel in Takeo Onsen, about halfway between Nagasaki and our real destination, Hakata. The youth hostel was really nice, but pretty far from the train station. So, the lady picked us up from the station herself in a van. It was really nice of her. The hostess of the other youth hostel at Mt. Aso was also very nice, which I don't want to forget to mention. In general (from the 2 we stayed at) it seems like youth hostels in Japan are very clean, safe, and helpful. They also cost less than $30 per night. In comparison, the nights in Nagasaki cost over $80 per night. After checking into the youth hostel and leaving our stuff there, we went to Hakata to check out the first day of the matsuri (festival). It was pretty cool, but not really that impressive. There were lots of people, but not as many as we expected. For dinner we bought snacks at the central park, where there were many stalls set up selling food. After a while you start to realize that they're all the same things over and over again - takoyaki, yakisoba, yakitori, okonomiyaki... all yaki, yaki, yaki (fried). There were some exceptions of course, like dessert. There were chocolate covered bananas that looked like little guys with hats. They also sold goldfish and little turtles (this wasn't for dessert though). After finishing our snacks in the park we walked around and took in some performances. There was a really hot Japanese dance group called the Honeys who did some routines, and a 2-girl guitar singing group. They were all of very high quality. There was also this Indian dancer doing a really funny/cool dance. I'm not sure if it was meant to be funny, but it was funny like an Indian accent is funny. The last thing we did at the festival was attend this dance thing. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it but it was repeating and the audience was invited to participate. They gave everybody two wooden paddles and you'd alternately hit them and wave them around in specific ways. After a while everybody learned the dance, although you'd still hear paddles being whacked at the wrong time. It was a pretty neat cultural experience.

The next day we came back to experience the festival for the full day. We had some trouble finding lockers at the station, however, because we weren't the only ones there. In fact the entire city was crowded with people, probably over a million. We bought our lunch in a department store and then headed back to the park to eat it. I had this sushi box that was meant for 5 or 6 people (I shared some with other people, geez what are you thinking). As usual Patrick bought the most varied sushi platter he could find and Michael bought a pretty-looking dessert (that was his lunch). There were lots more dance performances going on. They had lots of little kids doing dances to hip-hop music, and big kids later. We left when the old people came to do their dance, which was kind of sad. That's when we checked out this procession with a guy wearing a black mask sitting on a horse. I have no idea what he symbolizes but there were lots of people packed all around just watching him do nothing. That was boring too. After all that we walked for hours taking in the parade that went down the main street. First came the baton twirlers, and for the next 10 minutes that was all you'd see - groups of baton twirlers one after another. After that were the marching bands, and literally band after band would march by. I recognized one of them playing the intro song to Hana Yori Dango. After the marching bands were old women doing traditional Japanese dances. We left shortly thereafter because there was only one shinkansen we could ride that was going back to Kyoto that day. So that was an anticlimactic sort of ending to our trip, but enriching and fun nonetheless.

After I got home at around 11 PM, a guy called Max also entered. He was the SCTI student from last year who is now studying in Japan at Kanazawa university under a scholarship from the ministry of education. We chatted until about 3 in the morning about various things, but mainly it was him giving me advice on Japanese girls. This was quite understandable considering he was probably 6'2" and a muscular white guy.

The next day I went on a trip to Kamigamo Shrine, which is a required trip for my architecture class. There was a cool horse race going on at the Shrine. I got some video of them galloping by. It is really incredible how fast they are going - you don't realize it until you watch them run by right next to you. After the temple trip, Pat, Michael, Mike's friend Chris, and I whiled away some time at a game center. I had arranged to meet my Korean friend Min at 7, and a large SCTI group ended up eating dinner together and then going out. We first had drinks at a bar that was a hole in the wall, then some more SCTI students showed up and we had to move. We went to Club Africa, which had more space, and had more drinks there before it was decided that we really needed a trip to a convenience store to get everybody drunk. So, we bought drinks at a conbeni and sat by the river getting drunk. I didn't have much to drink, only a little beer at the first bar, a plum soda at the second bar (slightly alcoholic), and a chuuhai at the conbeni (like a wine cooler). By that time our group consisted of Min, Keisuke (Kyoto U student), and the following SCTI students: Pat, Michael, Mike's friend Chris, me, other Mike, Emmanuel, Stephanie, Deni, Megan, Johnnie, and Jason. Min had Pat had to leave, but the rest of us headed to a club called Sam and Dave's to go dancing. I was forced to commit because I forgot my house key and my host parents went to stay at a friend's house, so I had to stay out as late as Max stayed out, since Max had a key. By chance, he was at Sam and Dave's as well, so that made getting home together easy. We all ended up dancing until 5AM, when the club closed. It was actually my first time clubbing. I found it unbearably smoky and also painfully loud. However, the smokiness and loud music made it really easy to dance. Dancing is just something you have to do for a while to get comfortable with it - to get used to beat and the music and how your body moves naturally to match it. Social dance is absolutely useless when it comes to hip-hop dance, but I found DDR pretty helpful. It trains you to move your feet and to dance in rhythm. Everybody else seemed to have a good time too. There was a lot of grinding going on. A lot of the SCTI guys were just searching for girls. Of them only Johnnie and Jason were mildly successful. The girls outright reject you if you don't meet their standards, so this was somewhat a statement of the sort of people who came to the bar. The girls who come are looking for gaijin (foreigners) and are very casual about sex, from what Max tells me. The guys who come are the most varied bunch of foreigners and Japanese imaginable, sharing in common only an infatuation for Japanese girls. In terms of the club itself, it was expensive (2000 yen to get in, 2 drinks included) and the bartenders were good. After the bar closed Max and I ate breakfast at Wendy's and then shared a taxi home. I spent the next day recovering.

Golden Week Day 5

Golden Week Day 6

Golden Week Day 7

Kamigamo Shrine