文化祭

Last weekend was the school culture festival. It's called a culture festival but it's really more like a school play/concert type deal. Each class puts on a short play and does a performance of two songs. The teachers actually get to judge the song part of the day and the winning class and runner-up get a trophy and/or certificate for their excellent display.

This isn't to say that there is no really unique cultural things, but they take up a rather small amount of the full day's events. There was a taiko drum performance which started off the festival and shortly after that there was the unveiling of this year's "hari-e" picture. Hari-e is basically a mosaic picture. A large number of students spent the better part of a week gluing tiny 1cm by 1cm pieces of coloured paper onto larger master key sheets. These sheets were then assembled into the final picture which was a shot of the school from the rear garden, and it was hung from the back of the gym. Watching the kids work on the smaller sections it was hard to believe that it would form the picture it did so I was actually rather impressed when I saw the final product.

In the middle of the day, in between the plays and the class song battle there were a few free performances where people and groups put on music, dance, or entertainment performances without any kind of restriction. I ended up playing bass in a band performance with a group of 3rd year girls.

On day I was just messing around with the school's bass guitar when these girls came into the room ready to practice for the festival. When they came in I figured I'd better leave them to their practice, but seeing me playing around they asked "Oh Tyler! Can you play bass?!" I said "Not really at all, I was just messing around." and figured that would be that, but one of them followed up asking "Well, do you want to join us for the Culture Festival?" I said again that I'm not really good at all and probably couldn't learn the song completely with the limited practice time left. "No problem, just play what you can" she replied and I was trapped. I actually surprised myself and learned about 85% of the song with about the 3 hours of practice I had over the remaining few days. I tried to take a video of the performance with my camera that I had set up side-stage, but halfway through the batteries died and nothing got saved at all. Luckily, the school was taping everything with one of their cameras so I should be able to get a copy of the video shortly and then I can put it up on here. So until then, you're stuck with my few, and very poor pictures I tried to take in the dark gym.