Awa-Odori!!!!!

Post VI

So last night I went to the words second biggest dance festival (second to Rio Carnival only), and it takes place in a small-ish city on Shikoku – Tokushima. As it is a Japanese festival, you would expect it to be highly organised, planned, and so on. But in fact there was only one street that had any sort of structure. The rest of the dance troupes would just wonder around until they found a square of road, and start doing their thing. Alost all had their own percussion bands, and the whole festival is just 4 straight days of dancing. It was awesome!! The Awa-Odori dance is really simple, so that even us westerners were invited to join in with all the dancing, and though it was a bit embarrassing, it was quite a laugh. Unlike a British festival too, the food was great and the beer was cheap. So that’s pretty much all of my boxes ticked!

The women all wear these hats that kind of look like a taco shell, and everyone just has an awesome time drinking and dancing and playing drums. I would have put a picture on the bottom of the post but iPhones fucking suck arse and won’t do anything unless they feel like it, and it didn’t want me to have photos on my computer. (Edit: it cooperated)

Interestingly, I had thought about not going because I was pretty rotten hung over during the day before we were due to leave, so the thought of getting the ferry made me feel quite violently ill. But, I managed to force myself to go, and boy am I glad that I did. The reason I was hung over, though, was because I had decided to pop in to a little restaurant on the island, as I hadn’t had any time to do food shopping (I had been too busy that day sorting out a phone and climbing a mountain). I was nervous as I didn’t want them to think I was a tourist. Luckily, and somewhat unsurprisingly, they knew who I was because the daughter of the owner is a good friend of one of my fellow teachers. Also fortunately, a young girl there spoke fantastic English. We got to talking, and the master of the house seemed really cool and chipped in when he could. It was then that I was told a pretty horrible story that a girl in fact committed suicide in the apartment in which I now live. Now, I can only hope that this story was just to scare me, and that it is not true, but nonetheless  I will ask my Kyoto Sensei on Monday – or perhaps I won’t, maybe not knowing is better because then I can at least convince myself that it is just hearsay!

The night was awesome though, and towards the end the master of the house filled awkward silences in our conversation (by this point the young girl who spoke English had gone), by offering me a serious amount of alcohol. I must have tried at least 5 Japanese whiskies, all with beer chasers (for some unknown reason), Shotchu (basically vodka schnapps type stuff) and the local regions Sake. Once all of that had gone down, I found glass after glass of beer arriving at the bar, brought to me by the owner’s daughter. As all of this alcohol was free, so I thought it would be rude to decline any of it, so I sat there with the owner, his daughter, some other locals, and just drank far far too much. 

But, despite the hangover (which was actually less bad than it should have been because the alcohol here is so pure, not so many nasty chemicals), I really enjoyed the night and I am glad that I stayed for the drinks!

All in all, it’s been a cracking last couple of days. Chill tomorrow, do some more exploring, perhaps actually get on to learning Japanese (!) and then back to work on Monday….