Illuminated Thanksgiving.
I’m double posting today. Go me.
Another note, I ripped the crotch of my pants today. I’m desperately trying to spread the rumor that Mami did it with her teeth, but it makes everyone laugh and makes Mami scared. The truth is that I was playing soccer with the kids and extended a little to far for my pants to bear. I’m still going to encourage the Mami story though, I like watching the Japanese Teachers squirm.
This is to cover what happened from Monday when we returned from Tokyo up through this past Saturday.
The work week was fine. I’d say it was a little better than fine because our friends were coming and we were excited.
Courtney and Jason arrived on Thursday night. It gets complicated to arrange pick ups and what not when nobody has a working phone. We had loaned ours out to Sarah and our friends could only use pay phones. So we got pretty creative when we had to contact one another.
They were late coming in, but not horribly so. After that we had a nice dinner at bullet train sushi. We got there at like 10:30 and they close at 11. We were those assholes. Because the conveyor belt was pretty much empty we had to special order everything too. I could feel the hate from the kitchen, but the food still tasted great.
Friday was crazy. We were having a Thanksgiving party for our friends that night, but we had to work all day. So we were concerned about when people would arrive and if we would have enough food. Just general paranoia that you have when you host these kinds of things.
Despite the panic and stress everything worked out great. We had plenty of food for everyone and a pretty good time was had by all, I think. I never know. We drank, ate, and just hung out. That is my kind of thing. I think we called goodnight at around 1:30 AM, and slept pretty hard.
Most of us.
I had to get up at 8AM the next morning to go do a free lesson for 2 year olds. I have to say it was the perfect mixture of alcohol and sleep to where I felt like a million bucks all day the next day. I kicked that 2 year old lesson’s ass. Sure some kids cried, but they cried before they experienced my expert teaching. Yes, those kids love me. Freaks.
After lesson I went home and we decided to get lunch before heading out on our big adventure to Nagashima to see Illumination. We ate at Marinos which is as close to real Italian food as we can get here in Gifu. It was great, we were stuffed and headed out.
The place we went is called Nabana no Satou in Nagashima. It is right next to Nagashima Spa Land where we went before. This place is known for flowers, beer, and lights. We came for the last two.
This place has approximately 45 million LED lights. Thats right. 45,000,000 of those things. I counted.
The weather was a little rainy, but it didn’t bother us any. Only the floods of short and pushy Japanese people. We were so tightly packed that we couldn’t move very much in the group, but old people don’t give a crap and will shove through you and be angry at you for making them push. I lost track of how many times old ladies would start pushing past me only to bump throat first into my elbow. Seriously, I’m just tall enough so that if an old woman pushes past me, their head is just above my elbow, but their throat isn’t. Crazy.
We also saw this older man walk head first into a glass door. Let me back up, it wasn’t really a glass door. So imagine you have sliding glass doors. Well when the doors are open, they have to slide away somewhere. Usually they overlap large glass windows that look just like the doors. The only thing is that they are windows that never move. Well this old man walks straight into one of these windows. He breaks the glass with his forehead. Then he insisted that he should be able to get into that door that wasn’t going to open.
To his credit, he was probably a bit frazzled after head butting a glass wall until it breaks, but he eventually took the pleading of the shopkeeper to stop trying to enter the broken door and to go around. The thing that was really crazy that we could count no less than 5 seconds before someone else would run smack into the door again. Instead of assessing the “Door isn’t working” situation, they just keep pushing until the sky turns red, gravity reverses, and the impossible happens.
The shopkeepers put signs up, but that didn’t change anything. Then they put chairs up as barriers, but those goofy people would just get around them and smack into the doors again. Jason and I immediately thought of cattle, but I’m sure it was a coincidence. No real evidence to suggest they really are that slow.
So about the lights. They were gorgeous and awesome.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:16 pm by rl
