Sendai Jazz Festival

This weekend started off badly but wound up being pretty nice. I was supposed to catch a train in Ishikawa to Koriyama, but I wound up missing it. Out here in the inaka, trains come but every three hours, so I had to drive all the way to Koriyama, making the people who had gone earlier wait for me. To make it worse, I had forgotten to grab my mp3 player so my drive was silent (no radio for some reason, it has never worked). That drive is about an hour and a half.

Then, in Koriyama I `lost` my phone. I was really concerned because I couldn`t remember where I`d put it and I wouldn`t be able to e-mail or call anyone the whole weekend. Fortunately I`d just left it in my car by accident, but I didn`t know that until last night when I got back to the car left in Koriyama.

In Koriyama I met up with Gia, her boyfriend Gene (both Canadian), and Charles (Australian. He judged the speech contest my student Yumi won . By the way, the prefecture-wide contest is this week!). I went to McDonald`s (there isn`t one nearer to my location) and got the `moon-viewing` burger (it had bacon and fried egg on it, and was pretty decent, but I like the plain one better still). Then the four of us hopped a bus to Sendai, in Miyagi prefecture. That bus ride was 2 hours.

In the Jozengi area of Sendai, there is an annual Jazz festival that is fairly popular. Sendai is the largest city in this northern Tohoku region of Japan. There are lots of trendy and brand stores, and of course a lot to do. The four of us met up with Emi (New Zealander) and Tanya, who had come by bus a day earlier, and later met up with Hein (South African) and various other Sendai English teachers. After listening to a ska band in the rain, our large group headed to a small restaurant called Osamu`s Place and ate some chicken and had rum and cokes and beer. After dinner, we found an American-style karaoke bar and filled it up. I was pretty drunk so I sang three songs by myself all Japanese. I thought I was going to have a horrible hangover but fortunately I headed that off by drinking lots of water.

On the way back to Hein`s place, Hein and Gene were acting pretty crazy and roughhousing, and they decided to go skinnydip in the river. Tanya, Emi, Charles and I passed because we thought that a river in a large city must be filthy. Gene, Hein, and Gia all went in in the dark, and I had the brilliant idea of stealing their clothes. We didn`t run very far with their backpacks before Hein caught up with us and we surrendered their things back to them. I`d much rather steal the clothes than have to try to retrieve them! Heh, I am evil.

After watching some videos Gene downloaded onto Hein`s computer (they featured Parkour, a sport of jumping all over the place in urban settings, down staircases and across rooftops and the like), we crashed. The next day we wandered around listening to some good music (including lots of Beatles covers), got spicy ramen, and hopped a bus back to Koriyama. I got home around midnight last night after the three-hour return trip.

In Sendai as in Tokyo, some people wear really crazy fashions. We saw little girls dressed as Sailor Moon, men dressed as goth bishonen (pretty boys), and women wearing odd half mandarin satin dress, half marching band uniform ensembles. Most people dressed a little wilder than in the US, but tamer than that.

So with missing the train, losing my phone, and forgetting my mp3 player, I was really glad that in the end I had a fun weekend of travel, music, and partying.

NEWS: I tend to write more in my other blog, http://www.xanga.com/unfizzy because this one is a pain to publish in.