文化祭！(Bunkasai--Cultural Festival Days 1 and 2) and Man I'm Tired!

So this weekend was Musashino Joshi's annual Cultural Festival, an event that all high schools (I would assume) have, where the school is open to the public and classes and clubs put on events, or set up quiz games or food booths. Essentially it's like a carnival. Traditional culture...not so much (though there are aspects of it). Mostly it's just good fun. My class was doing a chocolate banana food booth, so on Friday (the school-wide prep day, even though techincally it was another Japanese holiday) we got cardboard and began making our booth, which was Hawaiian themed.

And you'd think it wouldn't take very long, but it took the entire day and then about half an hour on Saturday. (Also, what' you're seeing is Summer Uniform Form 1.5, where there's the sweater over the shirt.) But in the end the booth turned out pretty sweet, if I may say so myself:

The top says Chocobana, and the sides of the poles are made to look like palm trees with a monkay on it. I helped cut and paint and set stuff up...it was pretty tiring. Friday night I actually came home and fell asleep on my bed at six and slept until eight before waking up for dinner!

Then on Saturday morning bright and early I headed off to school. We all had time slots for who was making the bananas and who was selling them, and on Saturday my only job was to make bananas for about an hour and a half.

I was in charge of chopping up the strawberry chocolate, so it'd be easier to melt and then of dipping the bananas in the chocolate itself. (All while wearing face mask, plastic gloves, apron and head scarf.) Look and drool my friends, look and drool:

And one tray=100yen, or a little over a dollar. Not a bad deal, if I may say so myself. Anyhow, the hour I was making bananas was literally mass chaos, because we literally could not turn out bananas fast enough. We kept running out of chocolate, and had to keep making more, and before the hour was up we'd used up all the chocolate for that day (we had to keep some back for Sunday, naturally). So on Saturday I did not get to taste the fruits (ahaha) of our labor. But my friend, Valeria, who came over on AFS with me came over, so we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around and having a blast.

We went into a haunted house, and I ended up laughing my head off for a variety of reasons, one which I won't name here just in case, but partially for the fact it wasn't very scary, even though everyone else was shrieking their heads off while we were waiting to go in. But we wandered around, ate lots of food (I think my day one list was: hotdog, churro, and crepe.)

Well, that's me and Valeria with Mika (red shirt) and her friend (who I don't know). I'm wearing the awkwardly frog-green class shirt, which says Banamin on the front and then has everyone's name (including mine!!) on the back. I got the shirt in a medium, assuming that Japanese shirts would be small, but no, it's huge. I duck-tailed it with a hair-tie to keep from looking like a giant frog.

Then we went to see the dance club, which was SO FRIKKIN POPULAR. Everyone was shrieking like they were at a pop concert, but I do have to admit, they were AWESOME. View:

And that pretty much concludes Day 1 of festival awesomeness.

Day 2 I wasn't cooking and technically I wasn't signed up to sell anything, but I decided to stay and help anyways because hey, wandering around by yourself for nine hours is boring and just plain lonely.

Staying, as you can see, turned out to be a good idea.

That's me with my homeroom teacher, Hishiyama-sensei (or her nickname...Hishimama). Then after selling some bananas and chillling out and eating too much food (day two list: hotdog, baked potato, churro, half an order of takoyaki, crepe, chocolate bananas (we got to eat all the leftover chocolate and bananas). I feel very, very fat right now. Then in the afternoon I wandered around with my friend, Mizuki. And we checked out stuff and avoided haunted houses since she doesn't like them. I got a bunch of stares from guys and a few awkward "hellos" which I laughed at. All in all, it was AWESOME. And now we get two days off of school, so no complaints here!!
Oh, and we sold 50,000 yen worth of bananas, which comes out to about $650 dollars, so not bad on our part I believe.