October's Adventures

Ahhh!!　ごめんあさい！！(SORRY!!) It seems that I haven't written anything here for quite some time. This week at ICU has been very busy. Though I haven't had midterms like most of the other students, I have had two speeches and a Japanese speaking test. TGIF, right? "So what have you done lately except school work?" I hear you beg. Well guys, what haven't I been up to!

One of my favourite recent adventures happened one quiet Saturday night not so long ago. I was just chilling out in my room when I received a text from a friend asking if I wanted to check out a local Matsuri (festival). Why not right? I had nothing else to do. So we quickly got a little group together and headed out. The matsuri itself was surprisingly not far, it was actually on the same block as our campus.We walked into the shrine but it was pretty quiet

As there werent many people there we thought that maybe we had got the time wrong, we considered going to a local conbini and getting some snacks or even just going for a walk around the area untill more people came and just as we were about to leave an old man approached us. He wore a blue jacket, (there must be a japanese word for this but I dont know it) and I guess that meant he was running the festival because there were a lot of old men dressed like this running around.

You can see them here, the kanji on the back of the 'jacket' says Matsuri.

He recognised one of the girls we were with who had visited the shrine earlier that morning as part of a class field trip and he invited us all to sit down. Then he brought over two huge bottles of beer and two plates of onigiri and dished it out to all of us. We were a little worried about how much this was going to cost us but we drank the beer and ate the onigiri and thanked him, for fear of being seen as rude 外人 (foreigners). When he returned a few minuets later with おでん (a popular Japanese winter stew) and handed them out we had to ask if there was a price for this special treatment but he told us it was free. After that I guess we couldn't complain lol. 

The old man and his festival friends gathered round us asking the same questions over and over in Japanese: Where are you from? America? Do you study at ICU? At least we had plenty of practice answering the questions correctly. After some time the conversation turned to the activities at the festival, the men started telling us about something that was about to happen which would involve bananas. As they were speaking Japanese in a form we had never heard before ( i guess it was very informal male language) we had had some trouble understanding them up until now but when we got to the bananas we couldn't help but think WTF! We thought we might have to bang bananas on a drum, or buy all of the bananas. Then we gathered that we had to shout 「はい！！百円」 (yes! 100 yen!) and then bang our hand on something. We did not understand in the slightest so we tried to explain to the lovely old men but I think they took this confusion to mean that we had no money and the next thing they knew they were pooling together to give us 100yen each. What the hell was going on?!

Finally the time came for the banana game and the men took us over to this stand.

My main concern was that if I did something wrong, I wouldn't be able to afford all those bananas.

Another old man to the left of the stage noticed we were 外人(foreigners) and offered further explanation by shouting: 「はい！バナナ、バナナ！分か？ OK！」　which roughly translates to 'Yes! banana, banana, do you understand? OK'. Except we definatley did not understand. 

In the end it turned out that this game was a mock auction, in which the host would tell a story to distract the audience and then shout out random prices and the fastest person to raise their hand and accept the price would pay that price. The trick is to listen out for the low prices and avoid the high prices. It was fun once we understood and I think our group alone walked away with at least 60 bananas. 

Most Matsuri have a great selection of traditional Japanese fast food. 

This guy right here is making Takoyaki, its sort of like an octopus dumpling. Its tastes really good!

And this is a Yakisoba stall.

 The old men had fed us well with onigiri, oden and yakitori but I still had some Takoyaki because its awesome. Very had to eat 8 in one go though!

By this time the matsuri was getting pretty busy!

I've only been to two matsuri so far but they always seem to have a kids game slightly resembling hook a duck.

So what else have I been up to recently...hmm, nothing much. I guess I should just end my post here. Oh wait I went to Disney Sea. but you don't want to hear about that right? Haha can you tell that I'm still super happy that I was able to go? 21 years of life and I'd never been to Disneyland until last week, I honestly can't say I would have enjoyed it more as a child because tbh it was pretty frikkin awesome.

MUM SAYS ITS JUST MAGICAL!!!

If that photo doesn't look like an advertisement for Disneyland I don't know what does!

We had to get up at 6am, to leave campus for 7 and get to the park at about 8.30 but it was well worth the early start. The park itself is split up into several sections, the themes are; Venice, 1920s America, Medieval times, Arabian Nights, The Aztecs,  Mermaid Lagoon, Cape Cod and Mysterious Island. The attention to detail is absolutley amazing, I hope you will be able to see from the photos. 

This is the castle area, can you see the big tower in the distance? That's the tower of terror - Disney's drop ride.

This is the central lake where all the shows are performed. You can see 'Venice' on the other side.

Part of 'Venice' and part of the Volcano

The Tower of Terror - 199ft of fun? I guess :|

Venice!

We managed to go on four rides while we were there; Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Tower of Terror x 2. I had never been on a drop ride before the tower of terror and though the first time wasn't to bad the 2nd time left me shaking so I think maybe twice is enough for me. If you cant really tell how tall it is in the photos its 199ft. To put that into perspective, I heard that if it was 1ft taller it would need to have lighting on it so that aeroplanes would be aware of it. ...yeah. I have to say I did enjoy the other rides though.

We had fun doing other things too. Apparently the thing to do at Disneyland in Japan is to buy character ears and walk around wearing them all day, I went for princess Minnie.

Another thing about Disneyland over here is that they like their popcorn, in all different flavours and in different sized and shaped containers (that people don't mind paying £15 for lol). I opted to try the curry flavoured popcorn which is offered in the Arabian Nights section of the park, it was actually really good so much so that I might even try making it at home in the future. Curry powder + popcorn = tasty snack! They have other flavours to try in the park like black pepper, strawberry, chocolate, milk tea, caramel, etc. I tried the chocolate and milk tea but they didn't really compare to the curry. Next time I want to try strawberry!

Heres a few more pictures of my day at Disney Sea. My camera ran out of battery pretty quickly so a lot of these have been 'borrowed' from a friend :)

With some lovely friends of mine, another reason why we went last week was to see the Halloween decorations.

This actor was awesome. Terrible English accent, awesome insults.

We got to see one of the shows while we were there, how realistic is this unicorn please?

The Hercules Gospel Singers!

So that's all my adventures for now. Thanks for reading :) x