10 posts tagged “takaoka”
This is 花見 (cherry blossom watching) this spring in Kojo Park in Takaoka. These random bankers were like OH HI, CAN WE JOIN U? and who were we to refuse?
Because today was nice again, I went to my SUPAR SECRAT sakura viewing place (it's really just along the Oyabe-gawa behind Hard Off in Tak). Then went to the flood-plains near the Tulip Stadium to take some pics with my wide-converter, but apparently there was gunk on it, or on something, so they all look horrendous. I looked at it when I got home and noticed the big spots in the pics, but there was nothing on it, at either end, and it only showed up when the wide-converter was on, so it has to have been on it, sooooo I don't know -_-
Anyway, pictures.
And now -- a super short, boring as hell video of Dotonbori in Osaka, that would have been longer, but no more interesting, if my batteries hadn't died just then.
Welp, less than two days until the V6 concert. Excited? Yes. :}
Was just now checking train times so I can get to Tokyo at a decent time tomorrow night, and not miss my reservation at the hotel (I could call and say I was gonna be late, but this isn't an internationally-focused hotel, so I'd probably have to do it totally in Japanese, which is difficult for me). Hyperdia refused to give me the schedule I'd based everything around. Just wouldn't show it! I was like, "I was sure I could leave at 5 and arrive shortly after 9, but... whaaat is this shit?" Finally it started showing it, though I didn't do anything different. Silly Hyperdia.
Just finished packing. Fit everything into a backpack, including a smaller bag to carry around during the day on Saturday.
I may moblog while I'm in Tokyo, but who knows.
After I'm finished with this post, I'm gonna go through and look for cool cafés and restaurants in Tokyo to maybe check out. I'll be in Otsuka and Harajuku and Ueno... though there IS a new Italian place in Shinagawa that noriko wrote about a few weeks back that I want to check out. Meh, we'll see. :)
Got more medicine for my leg today, so I'll defo be able to make it through my trip to Tokyo without my leg giving me much trouble. My feet, that's another story.
And now, part 5 in an ongoing series of videos that no one watches. This time, the finale of Peter Pan and the NEETs. Wendy and Tink have been rescued, and though Tinkerbell sold Wendy out to the pirates, and Peter disowned her, Wendy sang a song and now everyone is friends again. Wendy and her brothers also grew up a little, and realize that their home in Takaoka isn't so bad after all, and that while Neverland is fun and all, Takaoka is where they belong. Of course, that means they have to sing about it.
Today was pretty good. Woke up around 11, chilled out for a bit, took a shower, sat at the comp for a few minutes reading e-mails and deciding where I was going to go today.
Heard the mailman come on his motorbike. "Hmmm... if my tickets for the V6 concert are for next week, they ought to arrive today!" I thought, but then quickly appended, "Pfft, it's just gonna be a bill, or something for the people upstairs..." In this way, the universe can't thwack me for getting overexpectant.
Welp, I grabbed my camera and my iPod and headed downstairs to the car. Approaching the mailbox, I noticed a big ol' envelope in the neighbours' mailbox. "Well shit, it wasn't for me at all... guess I'm going to the November concert, then..." I thought to myself as I opened the door to my own mailbox and found...
My concert tickets! I'd ordered tickets for the evening show on the 29th, but I was in the late application period, so I got shunted into one of the additional 'due to excess demand' concerts -- in this case, one they added on the afternoon of the 29th. :) Soooo happy. When I got home I tried to book the hotel I'd picked out for the concert, but they'd (1) upped their prices and (2) booked all their rooms in the like, day and a half between finding it and getting my tickets confirmed. -_- Found a cheap and seemingly-pretty-good hotel in Otsuka, which is only 20 minutes from Harajuku station, it's on the Yamanote line, so it's okay, no prob no prob. Gotta hop a train immediately after work next Friday though, so I don't have to travel all morning before the concert. No problem though.
Anyway, after that, and texting my friend who had helped me get the tickets (and who was either taking or arranging for someone to take my extra ticket) the good news, I headed off. I decided I wanted to go to Wajima, which is at the far northern tip of the Noto Peninsula. ... I didn't make it that far, because it's further than I thought, and my leg (which I hadn't put a medicine patch on, because pfft, i'm sitting on my ass, why would I need that! -_-) started to ache a bit. Made it almost all the way to Nanao though, and took some great (I think) pictures. Behold!
Anyway, it's like, 4:30AM, and I should really really go to bed. I still have two days of holiday before I have to go back to work. I should go someplace again tomorrow/today, but I'm not sure where. Maybe I'll head east this time.
Finally, after 9 months of hard work and preparation on the part of the writers, producers, directors (one of them was me!) and 5 months of practice and memorization from the cast, the 17th Annual Toyama International Charity Show was yesterday, and I must say that it was fantastic. We all worked so hard and so long, and this show, Peter Pan and the NEETs, this fruit of my mental loins as it were, is more than I could have hoped it to be.
We did two shows, a sort of half-full matinee audience, and then an almost-full house at the evening show. We don't know how much money we made for our charities quite yet, but it's almost certain that we made more than we did last year, and that's fantastic. Everything went off pretty smoothly. To explain what the show was like, though... it's pretty much impossible for me to do it in words. Instead, I'll show you pictures, and videos, and hopefully you can appreciate how great it was.
9カ月のきつい仕事の後に最終的に昨日開かれたチャリティーショー。それは驚くべきものでした。だれも、ピーター・パンとNEETが、より良いのを望むことができませんでした。
私たちは2回のショーをしました。 最初に、半分入っているマチネー。しかしながら、晩のショーはほとんど完全でした。私たちは、チャリティーのためにどのくらいのお金を稼いだかをまだ知っていません。しかし、昨年以上を稼いだと確信しています。 単語におけるショーについて説明するのは難しいです。 代わりに、写真とビデオを見せるつもりです。ショーがどれくらい素晴らしかったかを理解することができることを願っています。
Voxの外部からこれを読んでいるなら、VoxかYouTubeを訪問して、ビデオを監視してください。
Right, so here's the deal. Every year, the JETs in Toyama put on a production to raise money for charity. This year, the Musical Comedy portion of the production is Peter Pan and the NEETs, and I'm directing, along with my friend Laura (who is pulling triple-duty as director, choreographer, and Tinkerbell). We're raising money for the Toyama Special Schools (schools for the deaf, blind, etc., in Toyama Prefecture), Second Harvest, which is a food bank in Japan, and Heifer International, which gives livestock to poor families and teaches them sustainable agriculture methods.
The show is on June 16th, with curtain times at 1 and 6pm. Tickets are 1000yen for adults, 500yen for high school students and younger. It'll take place in WingWing in Takaoka, directly in front of JR Takaoka Station. If you're in the area, please come!
Because the show is less than a week away, it's time for some last minute PR, and to help with that, our friend at NHK put some of the cast on the NHK Toyama news tonight to promote the show. That video is below (unless you're reading this syndicated outside of Vox -- then you may need to click through to Vox to see it).
毎年、富山県のJETはチャリティーのために金を工面します。 私たちは、ミュージカルを上演することによって、これをします。今年のミュージカルは、ピーター・パンとNEETです。私はディレクターのひとりです。 また、私の友人ローラはディレクターです。 彼女は、また、振り付け師であり、ティンカーベルの役割を果たします。富山県のろう学校や、へファー・インタナショナル(日本語のウェブページがありません)や、セカンドジャーベストジャパンなどのいくつかのチャリティーのために金を工面しています。
来てください！
日：２００７年６月１６日 (土)
所：ウイングウイング高岡駅前
時：１回目：午後１時
２回目：午後６時
チャリティーショーが1週間未満後であるので、もうPRをするべきである時間です。私たちの友人、NHK富山の大野さんは今夜、3人のキャストメンバーをニュースに載せます。 ショーについて話しました。ビデオが上にあります。
(FacebookかLivejournalでこれを読んでいるなら、ビデオは再生されないかもしれません。 Voxへのリンクをクリックしてください。)
Tonight we had the 2007 Toyama Eating Competition at Sushi Kuine in Takaoka. Sevan, Rachel, Warren, Bowen and I competed for the fabulous ToyamaJimmy cup (which apparently doesn't exist :( ).
We went in, and we ate and ate and ate. Ate them out of several varieties of fish, and then kept eating. We ate and ate and ate. Some of the waitresses started making rude gestures about us as they talked about us. Yes, waitress lady, we ARE gluttonous pigs, but it's a contest, and we ARE paying you a fuckton of money, and we're not really making your job all that hard, so how about you stop it. Thx.
Rachel drank tea to help her with digestion, and the rest of us just did our best with what we had. I got to 25 plates, and then noticed that the others were really quite close, so I ordered another five plates of shrimp. When I got to 30 plates, I was quite uncomfortable, but there was a piece of unagi I wanted, so I had that. Then I was thirsty as all get out, so I had 3 juice boxes, which took me up to 34 plates. The others got to 25, 24 and 20. So I uhhh... went a little overboard.
My total was 7000yen, and it was split among the losers. As we left, the wait staff commented that no one had ever gotten to 34 plates before. We're planning on going back another time and asking them to buy an ad in the program for charity show. We gave them a bunch of business, and didn't bash their heads together when they were rude to us, so it wouldn't hurt them to drop 5000yen on an advert.
Anyway, I'm still really really thirsty. Goddamned rice and shoyu and fish and wasabi.
So, I was able to pick up my new camera today. I went, as I said earlier, for the PowerShot S3 IS. It's pretty shibby. I took a bunch of random pics today just dickin' around with it before I had to head out to charity show practice.
The S3 also takes pretty good videos. I took several at practice today. I had to re-encode them, because they were huge files that YouTube wouldn't have liked, so I took them from mjpeg to quant. 4 xvid, but it's okay.
Today, I did a bunch of stuff. I transferred money so I can pay my unwieldy credit card bill from my Vietnam trip, I ordered more moo cards, because I'm pretty much out (and now I can make use of the great features, like unicode support, that they rolled out 3 days after I ordered my last set), I went to Takaoka early and took pictures of delightful sakura, while feeling the impermanence of things (but without indulging in fine sake), and then went to charity show practice.
Here's some pictures, because it's late, and I don't have time for flowery prose.
I saw this sign as I drove into Takaoka today. I'm assuming, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, that it's for a foot doctor's office. I'm basing this entirely on the giant foot, and the doctor looking pensively at it, so I could very well be completely off the mark. I'm reasonably confident in my assumption, though.
Also, tonight was the first time I asked the actors to try without their scripts, and for the most part I was super impressed with how people did, especially Rachel, who has a brazillion lines in archaic crazy samurai talk that no one uses and that makes no sense to normal people. Despite all the crazy, she had most of her lines down, with only a little bit of prompting. Really impressive work.
On the other hand, I'm turning into some sort of mental defective. When we took a break at eight o'clock, I went downstairs, and was like, "hey, where are my keys? Did I leave them upstairs with my phone or... come to think of it, I wouldn't have taken them out up there, so where could they be... wait while I hie myself back to the parking garage!" Sure enough, there were my keys, hanging in the lock of the driver's side door, and the car wasn't locked (not that it would have mattered). Nothing was missing, of course, because it's Japan, but still, what the fuck.
Anyway, now it's like, super late, and I have work in the morning (like, possibly ACTUAL work!), so I'd best be off to bed.
