Saturday night, about 20 bands auditioned in the Student Hall for the main stage for the AIU Festival we’re having this upcoming weekend. I don’t know how this school has so many musically talented individuals; they were all very fun to watch. The pictures above are of Saeki, singer, and Isshin, bassist. They’re in a band called チョゲ (Choge). There are 5 guys in the band and they’re all freshmen, meaning they just formed this band only a couple of weeks ago and they blew the crowd away. Hopefully they get the part!

Here’s a picture of Patrick bringing me coffee. We have Japanese 300 together everyday. On Tuesday, after our reading class I have a two-hour break before our Kanji class. Lucky for Patrick, he doesn’t have to take the Kanji class since he knows more than what we’re supposed to know. I don’t know how he does it. Anyways, because he’s free, he offers to make me coffee all the time. The thing is he puts the coffee in his finished ramen cups. I think it’s the greatest thing. I just wanted to show you all how genius this idea is.

On Sunday, some of the Colorado crew (Tristan, Kevin, and Chris) and I decided to explore in Akita City. We took a free bus from the AEON mall to Akita Station and then walked to Senshu Park. This park is the site of the Kubota Castle that was built in 1603. There was a bronze statue of Yoshitaka Satake in the middle of the park as well as the white castle called osumi-yagura, which served as the lookout and weapons depot. There was supposed to be a waterfall next to this castle so we were expecting something big and exciting. Instead, it was the smallest waterfall we had ever seen; it was quite funny actually.

After walking around for 2-3 hours, we stopped by at Lawson (convenience store) to get some snacks and drinks. Kevin was hungry and couldn’t wait till dinner; we had an hour till Toshi picked us up anyways. We ended up going to Kaitenzushi to ensure Tristan could eat (he’s a vegetarian so going to ramen would’ve been a poor choice). It was super cheap, only 98yen for one plate of sushi! Some of us tried the horsemeat sushi because why not? It was very hard to chew and tasted like…well, nothing. All I could taste was the ginger. It was still nice to try because now I can admit that I’ve tried raw horsemeat! I had 11 plates, by the way. That’s 22 pieces of sushi. Well, 21 pieces. I split a plate with Toshi. We both decided to try something new so we had these thin small transparent fish. I can’t remember the name of it, unfortunately, but you just need to know that it tasted very fishy. I ended up covering the fishy taste with lots of ginger. It was a great time. We all had food babies afterwards though and couldn’t move.