OBACHAN'S SCRIBBLES

The crazy dance festival is finally over!! (Here is my blog entry from last year with some explanations of what the festival is about.) And dear readers, I’m proud to tell you that I survived, and even won a prize!! :D

These are the wooden clappers I used for the dance and a “flower medal” I won this year. I’ll explain more about the prize later.

I danced on the 10th and 11th, and watched the performance of other teams all afternoon yesterday (and worked at the izakaya last night).　Right now I’m suffering from real nasty burnout syndrome, accompanied with a terrible muscle ache all over. This happens every year. To deal with the muscle ache, I have no other choice but a massage and some plasters. For the burnout… well, I usually try to deal with it by indulging in the memories of the festival, looking at the photos and talking/writing about the big event. The biggest mistake this year was that I didn’t bring my digital camera when I participated in the festival.

Before the festival, I thought that I couldn’t be a blogger and a dancer at the same time. As I wrote in my previous entry, dancers had to keep moving from one dance venue to another all day. The staff told us beforehand that we could leave just a few personal belongings in the leading truck, but we might not be able to pick them up whenever we want. And they asked us to keep them to the minimum. I didn’t feel comfortable about bringing THAT big, heavy, old-fashioned digital camera, and I also didn’t think we could have access to our personal belongings so often because when we were not dancing, the leading truck was not always with us. So on the day before the festival, I left my camera to a friend of mine and asked him to take pics of the dance parade when he could. Yes, the photos of the dancers in my Yosakoi festival entries this year were taken by my friend, not me.

Anyway, he couldn’t find our team, and I had no camera with me, so there was no way I could take pics of my team mates. Good thing is that every year many Yosakoi lovers post numerous photos of the festival on the net, and thank goodness someone already did so. (So quick! Thanks a mil !)
Check this site.

Our dance venues include places like parking lots, shopping arcades and main streets with traffic control. The venues in the pics on the page linked above are a parking lot of a shopping mall (EAON Kochi) and another shopping street in the city. Do click on the numbers on top and see other pages, too, especially PART-2 Gallery-2. Two shots of our team are included in the Gallery-2 (2nd from the top on the right, 3rd from the top on the left). Yes, the ones in which the dancers have small green aprons on. Too bad I’m not included in either of them, but soon our team members will post more of the better pics of our team and I’ll link to them as soon as I find them.
Stay tuned ;)