shoeboxinfukuoka

Hiya!
Tuesday night at the moment, and munching on some chocolate snacks while writing this, as a comfort for the huge pile of homework today presented me with.. Went to pay the water and gas bill after school, but since then I've been sitting (ok, almost..) nonstop with it, and I've still got five stencils to go plus todays kanji. Yadayooooo....

Anyway, enough with the complaining! Last Friday was kind of crazy and strange, but a lot of fun!! Like I wrote before we were (a group of fresh baked gaijins) out to tour the town with mame-maki. Google it if you want the whole explanation, but in short it's a cermony where you try to get the evil spirits out, and the good spirits in for the coming year. A very very old tradition apparently. We all dressed up as different gods (chinese gods actually, hmm...), plus two dressing up as devils. And then we arrived at different places, lined up, and then the traditional shouting "oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi" starts, where the two devils run in and get sweet beans thrown at them by the people watching :) The run out of the house as a sign of the evil spirits getting, well... out. "Oni wa soto" directly translate "evil is out" and "fuku wa uchi" translates "good luck/fortune is in the house". But since "fuku" also means "clothes" so me with my bad humour giggled a lot at it in the beginning. It's written differently, but it was still fun^^  Anyway, when the devils has run out of sight, a girl with a geisha mask walks in to represent the good fortune entering.
My God was apparently called "Daikoku", which would mean great land or something? Had a shitugly mask that turned me in to a smiling fat man. A slightly retarded smiling fat man. All the masks were done in kind of old japanese style, which I find, uumm... not very attractive...
Nontheless, we toured around the shopping malls -were we once made some poor baby cry out of fear-, the mayor and gouvenour (I probably spelled that wrong though..) and some other fancy-looking places. Got really nice expensive-looking food for free, snacks with tea twice, and still got paid 10000 yen for a days work. Not too ba at all!! :D
Ended up on three tv-channels that evening, hahaha. Our school recorded one of them, so if I feel brave I might put it up here on the blog. Not sure how to do that thought, so we'll see!

A kind of fun thing is that there's a few details about this celebration. You're for example supposed to eat as many beans as your age, plus one for the coming year to not fall ill or get sick. Alas, I recieved a whole bag of them, and ate them all. Because, really, who am I to believe in old fairytales? Anyway, guess who's gotten sick now... I'm not sure if I should laugh or not :/


On Thursday we have a pronounciation test, not too afraid of that. Of some really really strange reason swedish and japanese is kind of similar in the ways of pronounce things. Not sure how to explain it, but that's the way it is. So I hope that won't be too much of a struggle, and after that we have yet another test. But one thing at a time, for now I'm going back to the homework for a little while before going to bed. Didn't catch too much sleep last night (damn clogged noses!!!) so hopefully I won't stay up for much longer. Will have to save the rest of the stuff for tomorrow morning instead, yays! Nity niiite~