The Opening Ceremony

Today we had the famous Japanese Opening Ceremony. I made the minor mistake of forgetting to dress up so I guess plaid shorts and a Dr. Who t-shirt was good enough for me. The first part was the introduction of the important people in attendance, such as the head of the school, a guy from the US Embassy, a girl from the Australian Embassy, and of course all the deans and teachers. After a choir came in and lead us in the singing of the College Song. Next up speeches from more important people that y'all don't care about, but either way they all gave really good speeches and some really good advice about life in Japan and whatnot. Now the fun part, street performers. That's right they brought in a group of street performers to put on a show for us. They this mat like thing made out of sticks tied together with string that they could reshape into different shapes all while singing in Japanese. Some of the most memorable shapes they made were an extending bridge, flags, wings, fish, and Mt. Fuji. After the performance there were closing remarks and then it was off to the luncheon. At the luncheon there was an abundance of food we're talking sushi, curry and rice, steak, veggies, cake, pizza, hamburgers, sausage, ice cream, and more. It was a pretty fantastic free lunch if you ask me. After lunch was over we made our way down to Hirakata-shi station to get to the bank and exchange what USD we had over into Yen which was much less painless than I personally thought it was going to be. After we got that settled we headed back towards the school by way of bus and decided that we would go to Edon(pronounced E-D-on as we've decided or secretly eden of the northeast), which is a grocery store with an electronics/appliance store on top of it. On the way we passed a store with some awesome anime drawings on the door so naturally we stopped to get a picture when out of the blue a random guy passing asked if we wanted him to take a picture for us. Turns out he's a local Kansai Gaidai student and he ended up hanging out with us all the way to and through Edon and just like that we made a new Japanese friend.