On Thursday 7th there was a conversation test where I had to sit in front of two teachers and a tape recorder and speak about how I wanted to live when I get old. It went pretty smoothly and I didn´t make many mistakes. My big worry was the big test on Tuesday 12th. You would expect the week before the test to be a study week, but unfortunately that was also the week of the YOSAKOI festival.

YOSAKOI is a dance festival which was started by some university students 10 years ago. At that time it was just a small school festival thing but each year it has grewn bigger and now the whole city is involved. This year about 40,000 people danced and the population of Sapporo rose to over 2 million during the festival, with people coming from all over Japan. There is extensive coverage on the tv channels also. During the festival week there were broadcasts each day all day long. The dancers are divided in teams and it is actually a competition, but most people seem to enjoy the dancing more than the competing which I think is great. The dancing teams perform all over the city with the main dancing spot naturally being the central Odori Park, where there is a large stage where the competing teams perform and get judged, and a kind of tower with a band and singers around which the spectators can join in and dance. When I went there with Kaku he danced around for a while. Also, teams are dancing down the the streets along the long Odori Park. In front of the dancers there is a truck with big speakers playing the team´s melody and on top of the truck are the singers. Well, singers may not be the right word. A lot of times they´re just shouting in rythm with the music. It is really great. On a side note, Odori Park is also the place where the world famous Snow Festival with giant snow and ice sculptures takes place. Anyway, I first went there on Saturday with Kaku to check out the Korean team in which Kyeong and the other korean girl in our class danced. They were dancing down one of the Odori streets but we didn´t know what the team looked like so it took a while to find them, and then it took just as long to locate them within the team since everyone wore the same kind of outfit and danced around. And since they kept moving on down the street we had to run along a couple of blocks before we finally spotted them. After eating some yakisoba and seeing some more teams at different places it started to rain and we went bak to Kaku´s apartment. There Kaku and his sister cooked a delicious Chinese meal. Yummy! Since Kaku had to go to work I then went alone to check out YOSAKOI by night. It was impressive. 

The next day I went to see my friends Ayako and Kayo. I had gotten the idea that the Tokai school festival (Tokai is the university where I studied as an exchange student last year) was that weekend but it turned out to be the Hokudai festival (Hokkaido University - the biggest and most prestigious university in Sapporo). However, after we had eaten and chatted for a while the festival was already closing up so we went and had a look at the YOSAKOI festivities in Odori instead.

I saw an ingenius invention on tv recently. It was an accessory to mobile phones, more specifically a strap that put round your ear so that the phone is stuck to the side of your head. Not only do you free your hands, you also get to be the center of attention when you walk down the street. The funniest thing is that, no matter how lame the invention is, the people on Japanese tv always act like it is the cure for cancer or something. "Oooh! It´s amazing!" Just like in bad commercials, but on real serious shows (well, as serious as they come on Japanese tv anyway). Since I have heard that they have regular hands-frees (with an earphone and microphone on a cord, so that you can talk with your phone in your pocket) and I´m sure they must have written about the possible danger of keeping the phone close to your head for long in Japanese papers too, so it really makes no sense. But hey, instead of looking just like a maniac talking to yourself when you speak in the hardly visible hands-free cord, you can look like a maniac with a phone strapped to your ear...

After the weekend´s fun I returned to the gruesome reality and faced my most fearsome trial so far...THE TEST! Read all about the horror it in the following log...