Chapter 8: Mido-Suji Parade and field trip to Youth Marine Center
Sunday, October 10, 1999
He, I finally found sometime to update this page. Today is October 28, I am therefore 18 days late in my "diary"... I'll try to make up for that.
This is one of the very first Japanese event I attended in Osaka. This parade is basically like the parades we got in Canada, except that there is LOTS of cool Japanese stuff in there. Dragons, women in kimono dancing traditional dances with umbrellas and fans, religious costumes and traditional Japanese procession, you name it, they got it!! Really cool to watch too, as I got a special ticket from OUSSEP. We were sitting with the business people in the shadows, and nobody was hiding us... front row seats!!! They even gave us a small inflatable thing to sit on... I like special treatment, eheh. I took lots of pictures too (shit, where's the damn scanner??!). The parade went on for a few hours. Very impressive.
hrm, October 11 was the real Holiday here, but I believe they prefer to do activities during the weekend. This Holiday (I am not sure here...) commemorates some sport event that occured I don't know when... I gotta check better. If somebody knows (sensei?) please tell me!
Ok, now let's jump a couple of days in the future...
Tuesday, October 25, 1999
Eh, the first field trip of Oussep... We went to the Youth Marine Center, which is a kind of big building built by the government about 30 years ago, and it has the shape of a ship ( great :I ). It is a kind of camp your young kids, so I was pretty much confused as to what and why we were going to "camp" there.. hrm, needless to say, I would prefer to go someplace else. The fact is, it was lots of fun! When we got there, we had some BBQ, with lots, LOTS of food, meat (great! meat is sooo expensive here, I was starting to become a vegetarian, phew!) and vegetables. We even had cake, because it was one of the supervisor's birthday, mmm! After the BBQ, we met 60 kids between 9 and 12 years old. I was thinking: "oooh gosh, please God spare me this!". Actually, this was the highlight of the field trip! The kids were so excited to see "gaijin" (foreigners in Japanese), they wanted to be our friends. We made small teams, and I and 2 other oussep students were put with 5 kids. They don't really speak English, but they knew some words. They called the tall guy with us "Big", I was "oneechan" (big sister). Really funny!!! In fact, I think it's best to learn Japanese with kids, because they use simple words, they repeat it 10 times while screaming it into your ears and they try to mimick the meaning of the word when they see you don't understand.. lots of fun. We had a big fire, and other games.
Because we were in a kids camp, we had to go to bed at 10pm, hrm hrm well, to be sure nobody gets out, they locked us in the building. We wanted to sneak out, but it was impossible. Don't ask me what they do in case of fire...
"Well, we said, this is time to make a party!! Everybody in room number 1!" Oops, I forgot to tell, they GAVE us alcool, beers eheh. So almost everybody went into a room, and we had a party until 3 am in the morning. Quite a few people were really drunk, and we had to wake up at 8am to eat breakfast... Eh, some people really had it though...
Wednesday, October 27, 1999
Boring like hell... It's raining outside, we can't do beach volleyball and cutter-boat rowing. So there we are, stuck in the gymnasium until noon. People played basketball, volleyball, ping-pong... Pretty quiet.
At two, we left with the bus for Kishiwada, a town renowned for it's danjiri, a kind of "shrine on wheels". They carry it during the fall festival, and each town is very proud of their own danjiri. After the visit of the
danjiri museum, we headed for Kishiwada castle, which was right beside the museum. Pretty, but considering the rain and the fact that everybody was tired, it was a bit boring. We then headed back to the dorm by 6-7pm. Not the best day of my life, that day...
