Busy Holidays

This has been one of the busier weeks that I've had in this country so far. Here's the rundown:

Last Saturday
Normally most of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo is off-limits to the public except for certain parts on tours, but on the Emperor's birthday (Dec. 23rd) they open up everything except the actual insides of the buildings for random people to come in and bask in the palace's glory. After a pretty long walk over some moats and through several enormous gates, we got to a big crowd hanging out in front of the main inner building. After a while the Emperor and the Royal Family came out on the balcony to stand there and look important while everyone cheered and waved paper flags. Then the Emperor gave a really short speech and they went back inside. I managed to get a few decent pictures through the maze of flags, and a couple outside the palace. Unfortunately they weren't too keen on people hanging around taking pictures, so I didn't get much chance to hang around and take many more.

Later on we met with one of Noli's friends' friends, a guy who I immediately noticed looked like Elton John. I couldn't tell whether or not he was amused by me telling him this. But he did end up buying us tickets to his friend's concert, not to mention a neverending stream of food there, including such budget items as $5 Saltines.

Thursday
We tried to play some table tennis at the prefectural table tennis center, but they were closed. After several hours of searching, we finally found a replacement, which actually turned out to be way better in terms of price and space. In fact, for whatever reason, we were given an entire half of a pretty enormous gym, basically an entire basketball court to ourselves. Noli also talked to someone who gave us the heads up on a TT club there, which might be something to check out later on.

Friday
In one of the more interesting and anticipated trips that I've had, we went to Comiket in Tokyo, which is the biggest comic convention in the world. According to Wikipedia, there are around 35,000 dealer groups and over 430,000 attendees over three days. Perhaps the best part: it's free with no reservations required. Unfortunately, since I can't really read Japanese and I haven't kept up with much anime stuff lately, the vast majority of the material there didn't interest me, so I didn't end up buying anything. But we did get to check out one thing that I've always wanted to see: a cosplay exhibition.

What is cosplay, you might ask? Basically it's one of the nerdier hobbies that I've seen, where people dress up as video game and anime characters and walk around to let people take pictures of them, often in the characters' trademark poses. Sometimes you get some people with fairly pathetic costumes that make you cringe, but since this was easily the highest-level anime convention that exists, all the chumps were too ashamed to make an appearance. There were definitely some people there that had to have spent several weeks putting these things together, and a few I wouldn't doubt that they started the initial costume planning back in October or so.

We got to the cosplay area with only about an hour left before closing time, so we had to go into picture-taking overdrive to cover all the ones worth looking at. We formed a tag-team with Noli at the camera and me scanning the crowd for new models. Unfortunately this was all out on a roof about an hour and a half before sunset, so there were some fairly horrible shadows going on for most of the shots, but we did manage to get some decent ones.

Saturday

After heading up to Noli's neck of the woods Friday night, we drove out to the house of one of his teacher coworkers to take part in mochitsuki, or rice pounding. There's a winter holiday tradition in Japan of making this sticky rice dough called mochi a few days before the start of the new year. Mochi is made basically by slamming hot rice over and over with a giant mallet until it turns into a dough, then rolling it out into a sheet and pulling off chunks to make into various dishes and desserts. Noli took quite a few turns with the mallet, but I politely declined because I didn't want to break their equipment with my rippling muscles. In addition to eating quite a bit of mochi-based food, we also got a free lunch of various snacks once it was all over.

That evening we went to a guy who works with the local Board of Education for another free meal followed by shuji, or Japanese brush writing practice. Not surprisingly, considering I have a hard time writing English characters much less foreign ones, my efforts turned out pretty subpar, but it was interesting nonetheless. I realized afterward that shodou, Japanese calligraphy, is one of the only aspects of Japanese language that I'm still interested in, so I might still pursue that even in America.


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I'm going to be spending essentially all day editing and hopefully posting photos to my photo website, which should now be listed on the right side of this page ("Kyle's Photo Albums"). Actually, I found a feature with my photo service that gives you a notice when I add photos. If you get an account with Picasa (it's free), then you can send me your Picasa user name and I'll add you to my favorite users list. Then you get a little notice on your Picasa webpage every time I update my albums. Otherwise you could just check my blog, because I'll also mention here whenever I update pictures.