I’ve been *really super busy* as of late!  ESS has been practicing so hard on Snow White, it’s been literally taking up all my time.  In fact all of last week I only had 1 hour each day to myself about, after dinner, before I’d go to bed and stuff.  Yeah.  Which is why no blogs.  And Saturday, I had to go to school all day and practice.  Then Sunday (yesterday) was the actual play, and I had to wake up at 5:25!  On a weekend!  So I was really tired.  And so I took this morning off from school.  (Yay…nice host parents.  I was so exhausted though, absolutely no break from school and running around and stuff.)  I worked really hard on coaching, co-directing, and making sure everything was ok.  I also had the role of the hunter to memorize and stuff too.  It all worked out though!

The school was really far away, and took about an hour and a half to get too.  Really boring!  But we got there, rehearsed once, had lunch, then settled back.  There were three plays (including ours).  The first was ‘The Wizard of Oz’.  It didn’t have a lot of props.  But the English was pretty good, and they had Dorothy sing ‘Over the Rainbow’, which was cute.  It was pretty fun to watch.  Although, if you didn’t know the original story, it might’ve been harder to follow.  They kind of left out some details, that I automatically knew.  It was actually led by the teacher who did ESS last year, but she transferred to a different school!  All teachers have to switch schools after x number of years, no idea why.

The second play was…well, not that great in my estimation.  It wasn’t bad by any means, and the memorization was excellent.  The problem came in that it was Science Fiction, and incredibly long.  this play also didn’t do many props and was mainly just speaking.  The main character was half American, half Japanese, but had a British accent.  And while his Japanese and English were both excellent, it was a hard to follow story, and was obviously condensed.  The best part was probably when the American/Japanese guy ad-libbed in ‘You’re just a freak’n chicken!’.  It seems that he did that because the tone of the play was going a bit into the comedy zone because of a mistake, and at the spur of the moment he added that in.  It did crack up everyone in the audience who could understand it.  The problem was, it was completely out of character for the person he was playing.  And obviously the language style was out of place.  I notice these things of course because of my long time involvement in Speech…I’m so used to getting critiqued and watching other performances.  So yeah, too long and not well suited for the audience.

ESS’s play was the best, even without my bias.  We went the farthest with props and costumes, and it really showed against the other plays.  Ours came in second compared to length, but it was a lot more enjoyable because it had a very follow-able plot line, and actual acting.  The second play had a lot of sitting in a chair and dialogue.  So we came and conquered at the other school!  Too bad it wasn’t a competition.

On the train home, Shioli was sleeping with her head down and this lady came over, looked down at her, and said ‘Atama dekai!’ (Ah-tah-mah deh-ka-ee).  Which means ‘What a big head!’.  Absolutely no idea why she said this, and it was very rude.  Shioli does not have a big head, no matter how you look at it, although her hair was kind of falling to the sides a bit and made it look a bit larger. But seriously, she’s really cute, and it was very rude of the lady.  Very funny nonetheless.

Then we went to a Chinese restaurant.  I was rather happy because I love to eat gyoza!  We stayed a long time and had a lot of fun.  Really too loud though, oops.  We are high schoolers though, and ESS is particularly crazy.  We all ate dinner, which was good.  After, we sat at the table and played the thumb game, and whoever lost had to drink a bunch of this REALLY SPICY stuff.  It was really fun, and I never lost.  Yay!  I’m not going to explain the thumb game though, for lack of time.

Today I came in at lunch time, and then had Art and English.  Then ESS.  After school though, Shioli, Yukari, Yudai, Tsutomu, Jeremy (Hawaii) and myself all went to a picture boot at the mall.  That was fun, and I stuck the stickers to my phone.  Along with the ones that I have of Yukari, Shioli, Yudai, and myself.  Then we talked at McDonald’s, but Jeremy had to go home.  We all decided to have dinner together, so we got take out and brought it to the park and talked for three hours, which was really fun.  It’s bittersweet though, with less than a month left.  I did understand most of what they were talking about in Japanese though.  Sometimes it’s difficult for me to express my thoughts in Japanese, but now I can understand most of the stuff people around me are talking about.

Very fun day, yesterday was fun too.  But less than a month left, and I’m really going to miss all of my friends here~