soo this whole week was filled up with festival shenaniganry. the annual school festival is called the "gakko-sai" or the "gakuen-sai", "gaku-sai" for short. we stopped having classes last friday, and saturday and monday were prep days. saturday was probably the most exhausting day of my life. i was at school from 8 to 6, and i know that doesn't seem like a long time, but it is when you have to leave the house at 6:40 am. and then do physical labor like hauling huge blackboards up three flights of stairs. and yeah. but anyway. basically, our "preparation" consisted of getting our classroom festival-ready. our class decided to do a casino, so we had to make it all awesome and vegas-y. in the end it really didn't look like vegas at all, but it was still pretty cool. we taped huge black sheets of paper over all the windows, made really hardcore posters, constructed things for our booths. we had three booths: one for blackjack, one for russian roulette, and one for this japanese game called "cho-han". and just fyi we weren't doing the russian roulette where people shoot themselves. instead, we had two big cardboard boxes and we cut slits in the sides, and made a bunch of cardboard knives. you have to stick knives into the slits and try not to "stab" the pirate inside, who'll jump out at you if you hurt him. sounds like fun, right?
during these preparation days i realized just how insanely perfectionistic japanese people are. okay well first of all, EVERYONE can draw. it's amazing. when we were making posters, they'd just pick up markers and start drawing freehand, and everything would turn out perfectly. jesus christ. especially this one guy named so - he's INCREDIBLE. anyway. but yeah. so we were outside the classroom trying to decorate the wall. first we taped black construction paper all over, but then, because, apparently, it all didn't fit perfectly, we untaped every other sheet to make a checkerboard pattern. then, we taped actual playing cards over the paper to spell out the word "GAMBLE". but it was kind of hard to see, so we started tearing sheets of colored construction paper into tiny pieces, rolling pieces of masking tape into circles, sticking the tape onto the pieces of paper, and taping the paper around the cards. now you have to understand these playing card letters were around two feet in height. that's A LOT of tiny construction paper pieces. good god. and then, we ran out of yellow paper before we could finish the "A", and so i suggested we mix bits of yellow origami paper in, but everyone was like "NOOOO (russell peters-style), IT'LL LOOK FUNNY" soo we ended up unsticking every single little piece of yellow paper and using a different color.
we also made maybe about 100 feet of origami paper chains. you know, cutting slips of paper, rolling them into circles, and gluing them together? yeah. we had to make enough to go around our entire classroom like, three times. blah. but it was fun.
tuesday and wednesday were the actual days of the gaku-sai. tuesday was a holiday and businesses/schools were closed, so it was meant for parents/friends/kids from other schools to come and see ICU. it was a ton of fun. i had a three-hour shift at the russian roulette booth, but it was so much better than i thought it would be. some kids had bought those noise-maker things - you know, the ones where you pull the string and it makes like a gunshot sound? yeah. so i had a bag of those, and i sat in the boxes, and when people stabbed knives in the slits, i'd jump out, pull the string, and scream. heehee. totally my type of thing.
my mom and two of her friends came, so we also went to the cheerleading and dance performances. they are AMAZING. especially the boys' dance team. i wish i were a boy so i could join that team. haha. but seriously. so cool.
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