KeyFest

Well today was KeyFest at Soka Daigaku. Basically a kick off to the bigger festival we have going on tomorrow and Monday. It to place in Ikeda Auditorium with about 10000 something people coming to attend, ranging from students, past alumni, and others.

It is much bigger looking on the inside.

We all had to dress formally for this event, which meant walking to campus in suits, not all that fun considering how hot and humid it was this morning.

Everyone aside from a few showed up in formal attire. The ones who didn't got rushed about trying to find something formal that will fit them. I luckily brought my dress shirt and pants to Japan with me. Because I don't think they would have found anything that would have fit me. I didn't have a suit jacket and I was gonna borrow one from one of the people in the dorms, but after trying on 3-4 different ones I couldn't find one that wasn't to small for me. So I went without.

Once we got to campus we went and got our ticket to be allowed into the auditorium.

Then took a picture of a bunch of us guys all dressed up.

Then we had about an hour to kill before we would be allowed to enter the auditorium so we went and got some food since this was probably going to be a long event.

The guy eating the pastry is my roommate Senchi.

Then we went and waited in line to get in, while waiting Stephanie saved a praying mantis from being stepped on.

Then we got inside the place and found our seats.

Most of the international students were sitting in the same general area. After we were all seated that started handing out some little earphone things.

All the main parts of the event were going to be spoken in Japanese, so if you wanted to understand what they were saying you got one of these, and you heard what was being said translated into English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and a couple other languages. Very useful.

I put two of them on and was reminded of Harrison Bergeron. And yes I am growing somewhat of a goatee.

From there it was 4 hours of sitting. The first part wasn't bad because it was all of the different cultural dances, music, etc.

 

Its hard to tell because I was so far away, but that's an Orchestra.

Then the rest of the even was basically handing out of Masters Degrees, Honorary Degrees, and other awards. This part was a bit more boring, until one of the people receiving an honorary degree decided not to read the speech he had written for this occasion, and instead just kind of ad libbed, thus causing all the different translators to kind of panic, because they had already translated what he was going to be saying and were just reading off from a script. The lady speaking the English translation to us sounded like she was near tears.

Then after that I looked around campus and saw the empty booths for SoDaiSai tomorrow.

These are just a few, but tomorrow there will be probably thousands of people here buying food and other things. Then after that a group of us went to a small restaurant near campus for dinner.

Was good, but some of us got our food in about 20 minutes, while 2 others had to wait about 1 1/2 hours for their food. We weren't really sure why, even the Japanese people we brought with us were confused. Tomorrow I will probably go to the big SoDaiSai event and try as much of the different food as possible, hopefully its all good.