Takoyaki!

Last Friday I started to catch some sort of laryngitis so Saturday through Wednesday were shot in terms of me talking to new people. I stayed home on Saturday at Biggie's urging, but on Sunday I had to at least make it down to shijo-omiya to meet up with Anna (neither of us have cellphones, and she doesn't have computer access on the weekend) since we had plans to go to Osaka and wander around Shinzaibashi and Namba.

I ended up saying "screw it" and went with her by train ~$6 to Shinzaibashi where we walked over to the "America Village" アメリカ町 and ate takoyaki たこやき (think octopus surrounded by a weird fried dough the size of a donut hole) which is an Osaka-n specialty (along with okonomiyaki). Anywho, the American village is just a park surrounded by various hip clothing shops. The park itself (for all intents and purposes) seems to have been built for the sole purpose of allowing everyone who just bought takoyaki from one of the two nearby vendors to sit and eat it. Of course, Anna and I did so as well. The rest of the afternoon Anna and I just wandered around the various shopping roads and arcades (covered pedestrian-only roads). Anna was very nice and put up with my 14-year-old boy voice changes like she'd had six brothers go through puberty already.

Mon-Wed were not at all interesting. I didn't do much since attempts at communicating with other people had to go through my throat to have a hope of being effective (remember, laryngitis-esque symptoms), and were failures before they started. I went to Japanese class in the morning, of course. On Monday I could barely croak. On Tuesday I was at a whisper. On Wednesday I could kind of talk, and was even able to practice in front of the class the poem I was doing for the school-wide (I still hadn't realized what a big deal it was) poetry reading contest 朗読大会. By Thursday, I was even able to talk somewhat normally, and so Thursday I did a bunch of stuff for Ritsumeikan. Joy.

And then Friday was the school poetry reading contest 朗読大会 which was divided into a) people reading famous Japanese poems; b) people reading poems they wrote in Japanese. I (joy oh joy) was in the former category. Thankfully I have friends (and cousins) in the creative arts so I knew better than to just stand there and read off a paper. So I memorized the poem and added movement and more-than-minimal-vocal inflection. A surprising amount of people took the time to memorize, but only two others (both in the write-your-own poem category) went for broke like I did.

In retrospect, that effort is probably why we (me, and an American boy whose poem was entitled ナンパ (skirt-chasing) but was performed super awesomely--different voices for different characters) won the grand prize 最優秀賞 in our respective categories. Now here's when I finally realized how seriously our school takes its poetry reading contest: grand prize was a takoyaki making set, including mixes, a recipe book, and the actual takoyaki fryer and utensils. AND everyone had food afterward (pizza and sushi and donuts and sandwiches).

Oh, and our school principal is a Japanese woman who wears a kimono but dyes her bangs neon green.

Pictures to come eventually.