College Festival

From Japan 2011

I went to the Hokusei's college festival yesterday. Basically, it was a bunch of tents set up and reserved by student clubs that were mostly selling various foods that they were grilling in the tents. Nick was hanging out at the HI-C tent where they were selling mochi wrapped with bacon. All of them called out to whoever was passing by, advertising what they were selling and the price. One place that was selling takoyaki had a basket of little papers which you could grab from and get a possible discount, and everyone I talked to did get a discount. There was also a bingo game and people handed out bingo cards to a whole bunch of people. First prize seemed to be a DVD player and there were several other prizes as well. Participating in bingo seemed to be free so I'm not sure how they paid for the prizes. It also seemed as though almost everything was student run and I didn't notice any teachers walking around or helping with things. After bingo, I took a video for Julia who was participating in the cheer leading club's performance. After that... it started pouring rain for most of the rest of the day.

For a while, nothing interesting happened but at 3:30, my host mom came and we went to see her youngest son, who I haven't met yet, perform with his school's yosakoi dance team. It was pretty cool and reminded me of going to my sister's band competition even though it was totally different. They danced and shouted to music that sounded both traditional and modern. You best ones seemed to be most synchronized and often pulled away some of their costume mid-performance to reveal a totally different color. One team even did this twice with the same costume: from green to white to orange. Anyway, the files were kinda big so I just uploaded the two videos of Yosakoi dancing to youtube (but there are a few pictures from the day in the Japan 2011 album. The first one is just the first team that performed, though they were one of the better ones too. The second is the one that my host brother was in.