pretty busy week

I was supposed to make a post about the SoDaiSai festival back a week and a half ago, but never had any time. The festival ended Monday night, Tuesday was a cleaning day, then the next week has been spent catching up on the three days of school that were canceled for the event. And on top of all that I have a huge Kanji test coming up this Wednesday, and unfortunately it is a writing and reading test. At GSU we only every really focused on reading, very little with writing, so I've been spending most of my spare time teaching myself to write Kanji, Luckily last summer I had some private tutoring for Japanese and she taught me to write about 100 Kanji, but I got about 400-500 more to learn. So this will probably be a fairly brief post about SoDaiSai.

SoDaiSai was pretty fun, Spent all of Sunday going around checking out all the different food booths.

These are all pictures from the International Students section of the festival. I bought a ticket for every one of the food items so I could try them all. Also put a picture of the booths, and the actual tickets. I liked just about everything, except for the weird soup in a cup thing, it just tasted like badly cooked red bean, and the apple french toast I got was under cooked so I only was able to eat about 1/3 of it.

Then after that I went to the Japanese student part of the festival. They were also selling a bunch of food, but you had to pay in cash instead of using a ticket like at the International Student part. This is because the proceeds from what the International students sell don't go directly to the International students, like with the Japanese students who use this time as a kind of fund raising for their individual clubs.

There were about 4 Churro places and 3 hot dog places. But other than that everything was varied. The Churro places all had lines that were about 50 people deep. But they were worth the wait.

There were also various shows going on around the festival. I took a video of one of them. The Light Music Club.

Then at night time there was a huge concert in the International Student section of the festival. Each of the different International groups played a different song. I took videos of most until my camera died from being used all day. Note that it gets progressively darker so my camera occasionally had trouble focusing because there was little light.

Many of them sound kind of bad, but do bare in mind most people only had about 4 weeks to learn these songs by heart so they could play at the festival. Plus they seemed to have troubles with the sound equipment, either peoples instruments are to loud, to low, and same with the singers as well. But all in all it was an enjoyable evening.

Then on Monday I volunteered to work at the Freedom Group booth. This was the group consisting of American, Canadian, and Australian international students. We were doing hot wings, and the day started with us making the sauce. 

The Sauce consisted of 3 things.

4 Large Jars of Mayo 

3 Bottles of Chili Sauce

And about 9 bottle of hot sauce.

Then we began cooking and preparing the wings.

We basically fried them, put 3 in a cup, covered them in sauce, and handed them out. A lot of people were surprised when we said you had to eat them with your hands "American Style" But they were pretty popular. We Started around 10am and completely sold out around 4pm.



Oh yeah I also had a pink apron and a yellow bandanna that I stuck up.



Then after that I went home. I decided not to stay for the concert since it was the same as the one that happened Sunday night.

After that Tuesday was a cleaning/relaxing day. I ended up going shopping for some stuff. Then Classes started Wednesday and its been busy since then. Things will probably start to calm down around Thursday after the first big Kanji test. This weekend some of us hope to goto Yokohama to see the beach before it gets to cold.