The long awaited last part of the school festival....

Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera for this part because I figured that I'd be too busy running around doing the events than being able to take pictures.  Ends up that I had a lot of time on my hands and could have taken plenty of pictures...  I have a few that I took from my keitai (cell phone) camera.

Anyways, the last part is the Taiku Sai which is the sports portion of the school festival.  Basically there are lots of games/sports that teams participate in and compete with other teams.  There are 6 teams divided by colour and one homeroom from each class as well as a homeroom for the Junior High section make up one team.  The colours were Red, White, Green, Purple, Blue and Yellow.  I was part of the Yellow team!! 

I actually had fun in this section of the festival.  I wasn't really looking forward to it since I figured that all it was was a whole bunch of running and such but the activities were fun and unique.  I took part in "take tori" where about 17 long "poles" of bamboo about 2 meters in length and 10cm in diameter are layed out in the middle of the field.  At the blow of a whistle, 2 opposing teams rush to the middle and take as many poles as they possibly can.  My team lost by 1 pole haha.  Apparently, this game is known as the "girl's war zone" because girls do what they do best: Cat fight.  When I first heard about this, I was scared.  I didn't want to be in the way of someone's nails and have my eyes clawed out.  To my surprise though, there were more injuries in the relay races than there were in the even I participated in haha.

There was ONE event that made me very scared though.  Good thing I didn't participate in it because this game was known as the "boy's war zone".  Basically you have 4 boys per team.  One guy will sit on another guy's shoulders and the other 2 would support the guy sitting on the top.  That guy would wear a hat and the object of the game is to get the opposing team's hats.  The team that loses all its hats loses.  At first I thought it would be a friendly game where people are cautious of each others position and that they would just gently pick off the hats but boy was I wrong.  As soon as the whistle blew, I saw the guys take SWIPES at each others faces in an attempt to swipe the hat off.  It got to a point were some guy actually punched a person from the opposing team.  And being very loyal to their own team mates, another guy from the same team went to get revenge and things got a bit out of hand.  THAT was scary, especially since the team that was involved was mine.

On a brighter note though, I got to be the team's "cheerleader" for a bit wearing the big yellow cape and waving the big yellow flag.  Haha, it was fun and quite amusing.

In the end, our team came in 3rd after leading for half of the events but it's all good.  We all had a good time and made some memorable memories with each other and that's all that counts.  I did however get burned like crazy.  Despite how entertaining the day was cheering on fellow team members and participating in events, the school obviously wasn't really thinking when they thought it would be okay for kids to sit out in the sun for 8 hours straight with maybe a 45 minute lunch break inside.  No wonder kids were passing out last year...

Tea Ceremony ended around 12 and I had to make my way to my own class' event which was MAID CAFE!  A maid cafe is basically girls dressed in maid costumes and serving guests (mostly people who are obsessed with anime/manga) but in order to incorporate as many people from the class as we could, we just made it a dress up place where you can play games and watch Mori-kun (a classmate) perform.  He spent 4 hours making up this 2 minute dance (I only took a short clip because the CD kept skipping).  Quite devoted to making our part of the school festival as successful as possible.  He's also quite obviously not afraid of performing girly things in front of others haha.

A type of "rock, paper, scissors" game that we changed up a bit for our MAID CAFE.  The customer is one of our Japanese teachers and she's the funniest thing ever.  Oh, and the 'girl' with the long hair is actually a guy... haha

Pictures of our event, other classmates and other events.

He's actually quite tall; I think he's about 190cm but he has the thinnest legs ever.  So thin in fact, that I'm sure a lot of girls are envious of him.  The picture above that is my homeroom teacher.  He's a funny guy haha, I was blessed with being able to have him as my homeroom teacher for both school years.  And you probably noticed that I changed back to my school uniform halfway through because the yukata was getting really hot and hard to walk in.

First and foremost, I can't express what an experience this has been.  I don't want to say it all now as my time in Japan hasn't ended quite yet (although the last day is coming up pretty fast), but these past few days have been the peek of my program.  So let's get started!

Up until this past Friday (May 30th for those who don't happen to remember 3 days ago), all the classes in the school have been preparing for the "Ryouhou Sai" (School Festival) which is composed of the "Bunka Sai" (Cultural Festival) and the "Taiku Sai" (Sports Festival).  These festivals take place over a 2.5 day period in the school and parents, students, and children from anywhere can attend it.  Each school has their own Ryouhou Sai and takes place whenever the school prefers. 

First I'll start with Day 0.5 of the Ryouhou Sai.

After half a day of complete devotion to set up our portion of the Bunka Sai, the entire school gathered for an assembly to kick off the Ryouhou Sai of Ichiritsu Koukou (the junior/senior high school I attend).  We even got to count down and use mini firecrackers (? well, more like cardboard cones that exploded when you pulled the string and confetti flew out)!  A short movie was played to introduce the Festival which included pictures of the different classes preparing and the such.  This was then followed by lots of performances by the Baton Club (think cheerleaders with twirling sticks and without the cheers) and the School Band as well as games for the whole school to enjoy.  The best game that was played that day was probably the "Super Couple" in which "couples" would be chosen before hand and presented the day of to be judged by the teachers to see who is the best couple.  The catch: the male has to dress up as the female and the female as a male.  A girl from our class was chosen to be the 'male' counter part of the couple and I think our entire class thought that she was by far the best male looking female (that's confusing...) despite not winning the contest. 

Then came the evening portion of the Festival.  This was not required to attend unless you wished to do so.  It was bascially a whole bunch of performances of individual groups or individuals. 

Forgetting to bring my camera, I had to resort to my camera phone.  And since it's a phone, I can't use it during the afternoon portion of the Festival but could snap a few shots of the Evening Festival.