The Eye of Patrick

I know i have not been updating this lately so most of you have probably stopped reading this, but that is ok. I have been so swamped with school work and other stuff that i have been unable to find time to update my journal. But seeing my holidays began i now have the chance to update it. I will use my pictures as a reference point and update according to the pictures i have taken.

Kansai Gaidai Festival is the first one I will be talking about as it is the oldest pictures I have not talked about. Since coming to Kanasai Gaidai i wanted to get involved in the Japanese culture so I decided to join a club. When you join a club in Japan it is a major commitment as you will be required to dedicate a lot of your time to club activities unrelated to the purpose of your club. In my case i joined the golf club because i have golf before in my life but i have never actually pratice to much so i thought why not pick up a good skill set for future job applications. Also i thought it would be a good way to meet new Japanese people and break away from the many Japanese at my school who are simply trying to become friends with foreigners because it is cool or they want to speak english. My first time at the golf club was great everyone was very nervous including me, but they had such a friendly vibe to them that i decided to come back the next practice and had continued to do that for the last while. Clubs are an important aspect to any school and as a result when my school had their name sake day, Kansai Gaidai Days, my club and many others opened little shops around the school and sold stuff. I think there was atleast 20-30 different clubs and booths selling stuff, this was no amature operation as the equipment that was used by these groups was sometimes very complicated.

We started day day before the festival getting ready, we had a meeting at our club house and discussed what we were going to do and sell, my club had been selling baby castellas for the longest time (Baby Castellas are small balls of cake with chocolate inside) So we got to work painting and decroating the stuff that would be covering our booth, i was held responsible for writting some of the english signs as we made the booth as billingual as we could as we had many different people attending and we were unsure of their japanese or english ability.

Then the next day came, it was a saturday but we had to be at school for 8 am to set up, even though the festival was not till 1 pm that afternoon. When i woke up that day i questioned the reason why i joined the golf club hahha…. so i got to school earlier then i ever had before. All my golfmates were there and starting to set up, so i pitched in and helped.

Then we realized that one of the local food stores was selling eggs at a discount compared to other stores, there was just one catch and that was you were only able to buy 2 per customer. We got around this by going in a group of 4 and going through each checkout line, i think there was like 14 lines so we were able to get many eggs. It was worth it, as a penny saved is a penny earned as the saying go.

Other actitives were going on at my school while i was there. My school has a cheerleading squad and they wree doing some stunts, they were different then what I was used to in Canada, as they did more dancing then gymnastic kind of actitivites. But still to watch them was so interesting and exciting.

Before the festival started i was unsure on the number of people that would come to the festival as my school in canada has hosted similar events and the turnout to be say to be poor at best. But that was not the case, even with the poor weather we had, which was rain, many people came. I was in charge of selling to english speakers, so this meant that every foreigner that entered the school was required to talk to me. Plus I had to go up to Japanese people and speak japanese to them and shock them into buying my product, this worked a couple times. If you know me i am shy person so this was hard at first, but it got more fun as time progressed.

Here is a funny picture i took, it is a picture of the takoyaki machine that we used to cook the baby castellas in… in this picture it looks like the devil.

And as i had to go to class I went to the washroom where i was able to get photos from the roof.

So all in all it was an interesting experience that has taught me a lot about Japanese culture that I would have not experienced had i not decided to break away from the confines of my gaijan life.

Sorry for not posting but i will,

I have pictures from kyoto, osaka, kobe, tokyo and chiba to post.