This week my school had both the Culture festival on Wednesday and the Sports festival on Thursday. In addition to this, on Tuesday the whole day was dedicated to preparation for both of these events.
Preparation:
The preparation was kind of intense. My class did a haunted house for the culture festival which involves QUITE a lot of preparation. I truly didn't think it would get done, when it was 8pm Tuesday night and we hadn't yet managed to put up the wall separating the two parts of the room... Luckily, after working that late, then coming to school at 7am the next day, we finished it all.
Prior to that, we had been doing preparation everyday after school, usually finishing about 4 or 4.30. Our class' undertaking was definitely the biggest in the school, but I also think it was the most impressive.
The preparation involved making ghosts and zombies, making the walls for the path and setting, making posters and blocking out all light from getting into the room.
Culture Festival:
After arriving at school at 7, we eventually finished preparing and the room was ready. First was the Opening Ceremony, which was unremarkable except for one thing. They showed a time lapse video of the construction of a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' poster, made completely from sticking little coloured stickers on in a pattern. After the video they unveiled the actual poster and it is actually so cool:
Anyway, after that we returned to the class room, the vampire, zombie and other creatures dressed up, the rest of us changed into our class tshirts (they have everyone in the class' name on it, including mine!). I was stationed at the exit, and people were terrified. One girl (third year, as in 17 or 18 years old) was crying.
I went through the haunted house after I had finished my shift. I didn't expect it to be scary at all, because obviously I knew all of the scary things that were in it, but I was terrified! It was just an overload; a zombie following you, hands coming out of walls, heads hitting your feet.
After that I ate lunch...
... and then saw four bands perform. They were all boys from the third grade and the other exchange student and I joined the only mosh-y part of the crowd (ie, third grade boys) and danced and cheered...
There was a closing ceremony...
...and then after the massive job of cleaning up...
... I went to Macdonalds with my host sister, her friend and the other exchange student. Japanese Macdonalds is so cheap! I bought two McFlurries (called makufuru), two smalls cokes (futatsu S cora) and two chesseburgers (cheeseburger) and it cost probably about $9 or $10! (I was buying for the other exchange student as well, not eating two of everything.)
Sports Festival:
The Taikusai opening ceremony is actually the best thing ever. First we have to march from our class tents to the field to brass band music. Then they say random stuff in Japanese, and after that we run and spread out (still in number and class order- we must be in two perfectly straight lines, one forward and one to the side) and then do Radio Exercises. They play this tape (it is in English, I have no idea why) and everyone does these stretches in unison. Clearly everyone in the school doesn't speak English, so they know it more or less off by heart.
The day was just a typical sports carnival, classes over the three gades compete, there are no age groups. I was only in one event which was the tug-of-war and my class came second, which I think is pretty impressive considering we are first year and we have only about 8 boys out of 33 students. We didn't place overall though.
I basically spent the day talking to people and trying to stay out of the sun (I failed and got pretty badly sunburnt...) I didn't take all that many pictures, but here are the ones I did take:
じゃ、 またね！
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