Playing Dress-ups

Well, again, it's been a long time since I posted, so I apologize! But all the studying I did all year paid off, got 2 B+'s, an A- and an A+ for my university courses. Yaaay! My university also published an article about me in the most recent issue of Massey Magazine, you can find the article at http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/magazine/2006_Nov/stories/04-21-06.html. That was a cool experience! In addition to my uni studies, I also took the Level 2 Japanese Proficiency Exam (or 2級日本語能力試験）last weekend, but I don't get my results for that one until mid-February. I understood more than I thought I would, but who knows if I actually answered the questions correctly! Especially the reading and grammar section, the time limit is so short that it was almost impossible to completely read everything. I just ended up scanning everything as thoroughly as I could, then taking an educated guess at the answer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

So, I have a little catching up to do with my posts! One of the funniest things I saw all year was the World Cosplay Summit, which is held every year here in Nagoya. I'm not sure why it's held here, maybe it's because there are so many girls dressed like manga and anime characters normally! As you can see, it's not really an outfit that blends well into the crowd, but I suppose that's the whole point! So, the competition was between 8 countries around the world, and each team had 2 people in it. They had to do a performance onstage, and I would assume that they were being judged on their costume, performance, and how accurate it was to that particular character.

But, the performances weren't nearly as good as I thought they would be, considering that this was the world championships, and the teams had come from all over the world. The acting was really stilted, the stage fighting was absolutely terrible, and the routines weren't well rehearsed.
The Singapore team looked like they had just met that day, they weren't even dancing in sync with each other, one was always about 3 beats behind the other one. Needless to say, I didn't stick around to see all the performances, or see who won. And what I thought was really weird, was the lack of kids in the audience. It was held on a Sunday, and the characters were mostly from kids comics, so it was really odd to see the crowd was mainly adult men. I think these guys need to get out of the house more!

Another case of adults playing dress-ups in Nagoya can be seen every weekend at Central Park. I'm not sure how or why it started, but men in their 40's or so come and dress up in black leather, kind of like Elvis meets a 1950's street thug, and they dance like Elvis in the park. They have massive speakers that blast their music (usually oldies), and although a few actually can dance, it's kind of a sad spectacle! I'm sure during the week they're all salarymen or something, and this is their only chance to do something different. I can't imagine how they would react though if they ran into their boss in the park though! That would be embarrassing! The funny thing for me is, at Halloween no one dresses up! Oh well, such is the life in Nagoya!

I was going to go to Kobe this year to see the Illuminaria, but I wanted to save money instead for my trip back to Canada for Xmas. So instead, some friends and I went to the Inuyama Monkey Park, which is about 30 minutes from my house. It was really fun, expecially when the gorilla started walking really aggressively towards my friend! She just freaked out! The chimpanzees were absolutely disgusting, I won't even tell you what one of them did! Nasty nasty nasty! It seemed like they were really old, and maybe had gone a little nuts from being in a cage their whole life. On the whole, most of the enclosures were really good, but there was the odd one that was just a stained concrete box, and that was pretty sad. The Japanese monkeys were really funny, they'd clap their hands to get you to throw peanuts at them. And the babies were really cute!

Anyway, I guess that's it for now. I will try to write more, but I can't promise anything. Especially next year, I'll be studying again, and planning to come back to Canada and apply for the military, so it will be a busy year!