I should be asleep, but I finally got around to uploading all the video clips I’ve captured (no matter how mundane)–you can check them all out here.
A quick rundown:
1. taken from the bus from the Keio Plaza Hotel (location of Tokyo Orientation) to Haneda Airport. I was sitting next to a cool guy named Robb (who graduated from UGA!) who was going to Kagawa-ken, I believe; the Kagawa and Tokushima Group A folks were sharing a bus.
2. you can’t see anything (oops), but you can hear the Awa Odori music…this was the weekend we broke up into the groups we’d be in the following weekend at the Kamiita English Camp, and my group came across an Awa Odori ren (dance group–not just a Pirates of Dark Water reference ;P) rehearsing, and they invited us to join in. No, I didn’t curse at the end. (My battery was dying, though.)
3. a panning shot of the Arasowaren (foreigner ren), hanging out at Well City in Tokushima, before heading out to do some actual Awa Odori dancing.
4. a shot of a receding ren of kids, really close to my apartment here in Ikeda. I don’t really know why I captured this–I think I was hoping it’d turn out better.
5-8. Awa Odori in Ikeda! 5 is of the women’s dance (especially hard to do in those shoes), 6 and 7 are of the lantern dance (I love the way they twirl the lanterns), and 8 is some of the drummers. The way Awa Odori works is that a bunch of different rens come together to dance in designated areas at designated times. Each ren has a “ringleader” at the front (holding something that designates that group), the dancers (usually of several styles), and the musicians in the back, and there can be dozens of them. We ended up joining in with the teachers’ ren, though there was also one for the town hall, which we were actually invited to dance with (but didn’t).
9-10. me being a dork and taking footage of everything flying by as I was riding a shinkansen (bullet train) from Koriyama (Fukushima-ken) to Sendai. Compared to Shikoku’s trains, this was just stunning.
11-12. A couple of shots of The Ugly Men performing “Hotel California” by The Eagles (and an unsuccessful pan of the bar–too dark to pick anything up but silhouettes). The dude in the back actually hit the guitar at the solo dead-on! I would’ve captured the whole song but I didn’t have enough battery juice or memory stick space for it.