Through Every Winter Some Sun Must Shine

(Austin)

These pictures are back during a brief day of warmth during the first week of March. Campus looks so nice on sunny days.

Completion of a Semester

(Austin) With Christmas right around the corner the 2015 fall semester at Kansai Gaidai finished. This is a picture of my class on our last day. Sadly, our teacher won't be teaching at kansai next semester because she is moving to Tokyo where her husband works and lives. She still plans to be a teacher there too though!

Halloween Weekend, Part 1 - Kansai Gaidai festival

(Austin) The weekend of Halloween was quite eventful. Kansai Gaidai had its annual School Festival on the Friday and Saturday of Halloween weekend (30th and 31st). This is an event that all the Japanese students have been preparing for for months. We often see large groups of kids dancing in front of the huge windows on campus practicing.

That being said, there were many food stands setup by students. professional bands came, and it was in general a very active energetic event. We went to the festival on the Friday the 30th.

I grabbed a few photos as we walked around.  Sorry, these aren't the best of quality and don't really show the full festival. I took these as we were leaving. Again, sorry :o

The best part, for me, was the A-Capella singing. The skill of these students was truly amazing.  And it wasn't just Japanese songs either, they also did songs from Disney movies like Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid.  The Japanese school curriculum has classes and instruction for music and vocals, starting from elementary school. And it shows. These kids were great.

As I mentioned earlier, in the months leading up to this students had been practicing dancing so I captured some videos for you to see.  They're pretty good in my opinion.

After a few hours we were invited by our friends Yusaku and his girlfriend, Georgia, to go to Umeda, Osaka to go to a bookstore (Bookstore: 本屋, pronounced: Hon-ya). So, we left the festival, took a bus and 2 trains, and arrived in Umeda. After a brief walk, we got to the the bookstore.  Sorry, I didn't take any more pictures of the building.  The bookstore was 7 floors high with an additional floor below ground. While Georgia and Yusaku went upstairs (Yusaku really wanted to look at the English Grammar books), Elijah and I went downstairs to the Manga (Japanese Comics) section.

After looking around for a long time, we decided to buy 4 different series. I bought 3 books, Log Horizon Vol.1, ReLIFE Vol.1, and No Game, No Life Vol.1.  Elijah bought Nisekoi Vol.1 and No Game, No Life Vol.1.  They are in Japanese, so we are going to try and translate them by hand :)

I did take a few pictures of stuff I recognized inside.

Great manga called Boku no Hero Academia

Translates to My Hero Academia. Poster is announcing its new Anime adaptation.

One-Punch Man. Also another great manga. 

Poster is, once again, announcing its anime adaptation (it is great btw, go watch it if you like anime!)

This is a manga series that I've yet to read called A Certain Scientific Accelerator.

It is a spin-off from A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun.

No idea what this is from, but it is great.  Yes, that is a dry-erase board.

MR. SKELETON MAN WILL RULE THE WORLD.

This is a -huge- book, from what little I could see of the inside it seems to have maps and descriptions of the world that OVERLORD takes place in.

After we bought out books, we went and ate dinner.  We went to a bar where all food items cost 300 yen (CHEAP) and you can continually order. Food was great. A picture of it is shown below.

Afterwards we went home.  Thus ends our escapades on Friday. Saturday's adventures will be posted in Part 2.

Indoor Fire Safety

In Japan they don't kid around about securing a building during a fire. When a fire alarm goes off, walls descend around the staircases completely closing them off in an attempt to make them smoke free. Make it to the staircase and you're golden.  There are doors that will let you into the staircase. If you look in the pictures you can see the small slot where the walls come down from.

If you are in a classroom on a top floor, there is a device which can be used to lower students to the ground outside. It is similar to a shoot, however it is designed such that even an unconscious person can be put in and lowered down just by sliding down it.  Sorry I have no pictures of this device.

More pictures of School

Took a few more pictures of the school, this time from the ground

Pictures from school

A few pictures from around school.

Opening Ceremony Visual Aid

I meant to upload this the day of the Opening Ceremony.. but then I got lazy. Specifically because there are videos involved and I didn't know how I wanted to deal with them.

That being said, the opening ceremony was really interesting to see. The food was also really good. The banquet was a combination of foods from around the world. There were the typical Japanese foods likes Curry Rice but there was also Italian Pizza and American Cheese Burgers. 

The pictures are of the Street Performance preformed at the Opening Ceremony. It is called Nankin Tamasudare, a traditional Japanese performance using lightly woven bamboo sticks to make shapes.

Torii Gates

Suspension Bridge

Arch

So many arches you'd think you were in ancient Rome!

A School of fish

Up close and Fishy

Fishing rods, gotta catch that school of fish!

Mount Fuji

Just look at that mount range!

The performers after the ceremony was over.

I also took a short video of the actual performance.

NOTE: The audio is loud and... not very good. So I would turn down your speakers before playing.

A small example of what went on to make each shape.

This was them leaving after the performance was over.

Also, I got a single picture of the food before all the hungry college students decimated the table. It was a brutal fight for food, only the strongest survived.

Not pictured here were the other 3 tables exactly like this one plus the other food stands.

It was delicious.

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.