Music club live day 2

Sunday was the 2nd half of the live event, and my group was to perform 3rd (out of 18 bands).

I managed to get video of most of my group's performance, but oh my god it sucks, LOL. I only messed up once, but had no idea how bad the guitars sounded. xDDDD Or at least Tsuyoshi. And then Shouko forgot some of the lyrics, lol, so basically, the only one that didn't screw up was drummer Marina, and she's the only one that performed in two different bands, pffft. xD We're so lame.

My friend Ryuutarou took these videos for me. He was kind of far away, but decided to take some video of us as-is, but then started a new video after zooming in, which isn't far from where the first one stopped. Nice of him, especially considering he's never used my camera before and didn't exactly get time to figure it out beyond how to start and stop video, lol.


Oh god, it's so bad. xDDD Way to go Shouko.


Zoom zoom zooom.

You can't really hear me in the videos. D: When we were setting up, I thought I had my volume set really high. In fact, I thought it may even have been TOO loud, but I know how easily the bass can get covered up, so I left it. I wanted to be sure I could hear myself or else I'd probably screw up. Well, when we started together, I couldn't hear myself AT ALL. I even plucked the strings harder than usual but still could not hear myself. D: That was really frustrating. I tried to not think about it too much so I wouldn't lose my focus, but I still screwed up a bit. I asked some people later if they could hear me, and they said they heard me really well, so I guess that's good. Others said that they also couldn't hear themselves play, so I suppose that's just how things are, lol. Oh well. I definitely could have done worse. I was glad I was able to move a little, as I usually turn into a statue during performances because I'm so nervous xD and if I try to move, I focus too much on moving and forget where I am in the song. I fail pretty hard as a live performer, lol. D:;;;

There weren't really any notable songs for a while, though this one sempai's group was pretty energetic and hilarious. xD By the way, this sempai is also Tambourine Boy (my new official name for him since I don't know his real name).





The crowd was really going with them, though no mystery as to why. I was sad I didn't make it up to the front, though I had just gotten in from putting my stuff away.

We had a 10 minute break after their song, so after I made a quick break to the bathroom, I went to the front right side (guitar side) so that I would have a clear shot for recording Ryuutarou's performance (since he was nice enough to record mine for me). His group performed Black Sabbath's "Paranoid".



(He's the non-vocal guitar.) My batteries died RIGHT before he went into the solo. D: Luckily I managed to save what I had before the camera shut off, so I didn't lose what I had, but from the solo on out, the performance got a lot better. His solo was actually good, despite him saying he had been having trouble with it and didn't think he'd be ready, and after the solo, he totally got super energetic and was all over the place, screaming into the mic and headbanging. xD It was great. Alas, I couldn't do anything about it in time. D: I changed my batteries after their song, though the spares I had I think were old ones I just tossed in after I used them, because they didn't last very long. xD;

The next exciting part was...by far the best part. It wasn't the next group, but a group that came on a few spots after, and they were to play two songs by Maximum the Hormone, which, for those unfamiliar, is one of my favorite bands, and their music is like...well, you just know their shows would be crazy and rough. And the keion members know this. And I know this. I managed to keep my spot in the front-right (having the speakers for support again, yus), and when the band was setting up, all the moshers came crowding up behind me, saying "Max is next, Max!!" so I knew it was going to go down. When the first song started, all hell broke loose, LOL. It was worse than yesterday, if that's even possible. Oh my god we all went INSANE. The second song, "Zetsubou Billy" was even worse than the first, but it was SO MUCH FUN afihA:WGHiwgnwgh;GN We were all throwing ourselves into each other, jumping off each other, thrashing about, pure insanity. I'm usually not one for moshing, but there's something about moshing with people that aren't total strangers that makes it okay. I guess I felt more comfortable participating because I didn't feel like it could get TOOO too bad since if someone gave me a black eye, it couldn't really be done anonymously, lol. But yeah, it was so great. I was rocking out so hard my ponytail came out (which is hard to do considering how tight it was tied), and I was a total mess. xDDD By the end of the song, there were moshers that just collapsed onto the stage and the floor of the standing area, LOL. It was fantastic. When the song was over, it was time for a second break, and I walked back to go to the door, catching my band members along the way. I was panting and retying my hair when Shouko was like "Whoa, were you up there?" I was like "Are you kidding me? I LOVE Maximum, of course I was up there! It was so much fun!" and she was like "Seriously?? You're nuts!"

Sigh. I ran out to get a small lunch from a 7-11, but it was raining, making me get all wet and gross. Not that I wasn't already gross from the previous performance, but my shoes got soaked. :( I grabbed some lunch and went back to the hall. There weren't really any interesting performances after that, unfortunately, but I took some pictures anyway.


Yet another person who's name I don't know, but she's adorable. xD She also looks like a little boy, and everyone makes fun of her for it. But it's so true.


The rest of her band. The bassist here also performed the Maximum songs, luckyyyyy. So jealous. Then again, as much as I wish I could have performed a crazy awesome song like that, given the choice between the two, I'd rather be able to rock out to it than perform it. Judging by how much I CAN'T move when I'm playing, I would totally not be able to headbang or even jump around while playing. D:


This was the last band. I really only took pictures because of the bassist, Mitoma-sempai.


Mitomaaaaa. He's the main bass sempai, who was always teaching at the bass lessons and coordinating lesson dates and whatnot. He was also the first person in the club that I talked to, as he was the person to contact for general info, and I had questions about whether or not I could join and such. So that's why I wanted pictures. :P (As if I needed an explanation. Whatever.)


The rest of his band. They played two Tokyo Jihen songs. For the 2nd song, the vocal and keyboard switched.


At the end of the show, they announced that this was the last event for Tambourine Boy, who was graduating or something, they weren't clear about it. One guy talked about how fun and nice he was and gave him the bouquet of flowers (seemed a little gay, lol).


Then after everything was over, we all packed up and headed outside, where we waited for like...forever. I took a picture of the venue, which is actually a music store/music school/music studio/small venue all in one. O.o

After the show, almost everyone went drinking, but since it's so expensive, I passed. I wanted to go since it would be my last drinking event, but meh, not worth the money. :T I had homework anyway. It was a great weekend though, and I'm sad it's over. This was basically the end of my club experience, since I will be gone just before their next one, and thus can't make a new band with anyone. This makes me really sad. :( I love keion so much. It's such a great club. I should stop being down about it and just be grateful Sophia had a keion club at ALL. I didn't think they did until I happened to find out about it later. Sigh. It's over too soon though! I'll still go to the weekly meetings, just to be there. I may have to say bye to club activities, but I don't have to bye to everyone yet! Not to mention, they might have a dinner outing or another bowling event or something, so there may be something left yet.

Music club live day 1

This past weekend, my club, the rock music club (keiongakubu) had its first live event featuring the new members. Because there are SO many new members, and they wanted everyone to have a chance to perform, the event stretched over two days, each day being at least 3 hours each. (Yeah, no exaggeration on the part about there being a ton of members.)

My group wasn't set to perform until Sunday, but we all went to the Saturday show anyway. Before that though, we got together and practiced for the last time at Studio VOX. I took a few pictures as usual.






Aaaand my side, with the bass I'm borrowing. It's a really ideal place. There's enough room for everyone, it's air conditioned, has nice lighting, has a mirror wall so you can watch yourself perform, and the equipment is all nice (for the most part). It came out to be 400 yen per person for an hour, but it was worth it.

We immediately went to the livehouse after practice, and got there early enough to get dinner from a convenience store and eat it before the show started.

Just like before, it was packed, and I was stuck on the side for a few songs so some of the first pictures suck. I tried to get some though.


Apparently it was the vocalist, Asuka's birthday, and they gave her the Stitch hat she's wearing, lol. I'm guessing this is why they made that band perform first. XD


Randomly, my bass sempai, Mitoma, went up and did some support vocal, lol, but he was such a goofball doing it. He was cracking up the whole time. XD

I managed to get closer to the front of the stage, and got a better view as a result, so the pictures from here on are much better.


Tsuyoshi (not the one in my group). His group did an Avril's "Sk8er Boi" song, ew. D:


Then the other members of the group. The vocalist is someone I've talked to a few times (I think Izumi is her name?), and she's nice, though one of the many people that are all "I want to learn English!!" when they try to initiate conversation with me. :| So I wasn't surprised to see her singing an English song.



I don't even remember which song or group this was, but I mostly took it because the crowd was having a blast with the guitarist, though I have no idea why. They seem to pick out a few people that they find quirky and totally just like, get super silly with them. (Remember the tambourine guy from last time? Same kind of treatment.) I was mostly recording for potential silliness, though nothing happened. So here, have samples of their song. The vocalist totally sounds like a chick.






I can't remember his name, as the only time I've talked to him was at the very first keion get-together, but I always remember him when I see him because he likes visual kei (specifically Alice Nine), and oddly resembles Saga, hmm, lol (and plays bass, go figure). Had he not also been a bassist, we probably would have made a group together, sob. :(

Then a video of a portion of Tokyo Jihen's song Shuraba:



I know the bassist from the bass practices. lol Kana. XD She is SUCH a spazz, but she's nice. She actually came up to me one time when I was eating in the cafeteria by myself to say hi, which sounds really normal, but club people don't really do that to me. They'll wave or something, but not go out of their way to come up to me and say hi and whatnot. Moving on. The male guitarist (who's name I don't remember, gah, I'm so bad XD) talks to me everytime he sees me, which honestly scares me because he talks SO FAST and I always have to ask him to repeat things. ;_; He's nice, albeit a bit silly, but omfg he talks so fast. Amazingly enough, I actually understood most of what he was saying today and only had to have him repeat himself when I simply couldn't hear him, but normally I can't. @_@ I had no idea he was going to play Tokyo Jihen. That doesn't seem like him, but then again, he said that he's played Kabukichou no Joou so I guess that shouldn't be weird. XD


Wayuu (? that's what her name says in my phone, strange name O.o), whom I also met at the beginning of the year.




I don't remember her name, but she's adorable. XD

Since they played two songs, they did an MC in between, and LOL, they made it a contribute to Michael Jackson by having one member do the moonwalk:



LOL I totally wasn't expecting the Thriller music to follow, so that was awesome. I started cracking up, so that's why the video cuts off like right away. XDDD


Okay, so here's where things get AWESOME. A little backstory first. There's another American girl in the club that I only sorta knew about. I hadn't ever talked to her before, didn't even know her name, but one girl once told me that there was another exchange student in the club that also liked visual kei, so that's all I knew. And it's kind of obvious when you see her, since she dresses fairly gothy all the time. I really had no idea what she was like, or if she would manage to perform anything close to v-kei for the show, and...omg. XD

She actually had 2 performances - one as a vocalist, and Sunday as keyboard (O.o), but today she was on vocals, and holy cow. XD I am SO JEALOUS. Her group performed "Blackish" by kitty, and as you can tell, it was a crazy song to perform. But her group was SO into doing this. Everyone dressed up (the dudes wearing black skirts, lol) and were trying to get the crowd worked up before the girl (Chloe) made her entrance like she would in a real band, lol. I know the bassist is a metal fan, so I wasn't surprised to see her doing this, but I was envious.


lol The drummer, posing and strutting while setting up. xD I'm pretty sure he even shaved his legs too.

The crowd was getting so excited before they started, so I took some videos. I really shouldn't have broken them up, sorry. D: ;;


As the band is starting out, and Chloe makes her entrance.


The crowd, seriously. xD

I stopped the video there because I totally wanted to join in on that fun. XD This is exceptionally notable of the crowd because usually they just kind of bounce along to songs, just clap to welcome the bands onto the stage and whatnot, but this band had not just the front row, but nearly the entire place at least shouting and throwing horns, if not thrashing around and headbanging. It was incredible, and awesome. XDDDD I wish they had had another song to play. D: That was by far the best part of the show. omg xD I never expected to see that many of the keion people to go all-out in the crowd like that. It's usually just that small, rambunctious group in the corner.

The last videos I have are of the last group, who did an Asian Kung-Fu Generation song, "Rewrite". I'd actually heard that song before, so I recognized it at least. This group's guitarist was being really silly, so that's why I took some video. xD



Then all of a sudden they STOPPED, and we're like "WTF?" and of course the jackasses in the crowed start harassing the band and whatnot, lol. Again, I don't know why I stopped the video in the first place, but I continued it almost right away.



Aaand there you have day one of 6定! I'll put Sunday's in a separate post.

Nippori + Ueno

Saturday I met up with Tomoko, the girl I met when my host mom and I went to see the tea ceremony some time ago, and we went shopping around Ueno. First we met up at Nippori. I got there first and waited at the appropriate exit, and waited like...a half hour. >_> I was like "wtf the station isn't exactly big" but it turns out that she accidentally went out the opposite side and thought she was at the right exit for the longest time. Eventually she figured it out and came back through to find me, lol. Whoops. She was a TOTAL SPAZZ as soon as she greeted me though, holy cow. XD I was so surprised since she was the typical quiet, shy girl when we first met, and then all of a sudden she was acting really high-strung and energetic. But that made it more fun. XD We headed out in search of the cheap clothing stores we had been hearing about. Neither of us has been there before, so we were both new to the area. It wasn't hard to find the stores though. We popped into one that was pretty big and Tomoko bought a couple of things. I decided to wait since I didn't see any MUST HAVE items, and we moved on. We wandered down the street and passed SOOOO many fabric stores!! There was even a flag that said "Fabric town" lol which was so true. There were more fabric stores than clothing stores. I really had to resist going into them because I knew I would take forever. D: That will have to be saved for its own trip, seriously. It was intense.

All I ended up buying was a cute skirt that was under 700 yen, but if/when I go back there, I'll probably get more. I didn't really know what I wanted beyond shoes, and since there weren't really any shoes stores, that's all I got.


We passed this HUGE dog at one point. He was so big, and so cute and fluffy. I wanted to pet him.


The Nippori area, namely the fabric town, lol.


The other side of Nippori station, which was WAY bigger than the other side, wtf. Looks like a completely different area.

Tomoko REALLY wanted to take purikura, so we next went on a hunt for a game center. After searching all over and finding NONE, we asked a kouban about it and said there weren't any in the area, but surely there were some at Ueno. So we headed to the station and went to Ueno, which was only 2 stops away.


Uenoooooo


Ueno was full of shops, and VERY crowded. This street was lined with shops and restaurants. We looked through quite a few of them.


Oh my god, this was so awesome. xD These are GARGANTUOUS takoyaki. I kind of wanted one, but decided against it. I wanted a picture at least. So huge. Normal takoyaki are a little smaller than an egg, but as you can see, these were big enough to have an egg INSIDE of them.


lol These shoes were spectacular.


This was meant to be a picture of what we were guessing was a kouban (small police station) since it had stuff about "crime stopping" written on it. It was the coolest kouban ever.

Anyway, we found a game center and took some purikura.



Tomoko is kind of ADORABLE. She makes me look old. D:

After lots of (mostly window) shopping, we decided to get dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food in Japan is WAY different from Chinese food in America (undoubtedly much more authentic), and thus, I was unfamiliar with what they had beyond ramen, so I just got ramen, lol. It was okay. Too much onion though. After we ate, we pretty much just headed back to Omiya, which was cool since it was getting late. We parted at Omiya and I went home after checking out Book-Off for a few minutes.

Hiroshima pt. 2: Miyajima

We woke up early on Sunday and had an even nice breakfast than the morning before. There was a long wait for it though, which was a bit risky since we had less time, but we managed to get in and eat with time to spare. I was happy to have an appetite this time and tried to fill myself up so I wouldn't be hungry later. I think it worked.

We left the hotel and walked a couple of blocks to our tour bus. I could already tell it would be a hot but lovely day. We took a 30 minute-ish trip to Miyajima, and of course, when you're bored on the bus, (crappy) pictures are bound to be taken.


Here's the outside of the Peace Museum, with a fountain in the shot.


More of Hiroshima as we were leaving.





We arrived in Miyajima and had about 15 minutes to spare before we were to board our ferry. I was so excited to see the ocean. It feels like it's been forever!






We soon boarded our ferry (taken on the boat) and departed in no time.




Oh my god there were SO MANY JELLYFISH. Someone tried to count them as we passed and gave up after a while. I definitely would not want to swim in that water.



Our destination in sight.



The torii gate of the Itsukushima Shrine.








On land again! And a shot of the boat we were actually on.


SO CLOSE!


lol Saw this as we were getting off the port. It's cute.


We had to gather around here in the heat while everyone got organized.


"Miyajima Town". Also Dan, who was in my group.


While we were waiting, Bambi came to greet us. Miyajima is known for its deer roaming around, and there were quite a few of them.


Finally we departed. We first went to Itsukushima Shrine, and had to walk through a lot of touristy streets to get there.


The other, less awesome torii at the entrance of the shrine.


OMG BEACH. I wanted to jump down there and splash in the water so bad. ;A;


Anyway, so our tour started with Itsukushima Shrine. As you can probably tell, the tide comes up under the shrine around noon, and it looks like the shrine is floating. Unfortunately we were too early to see this, but you can see the wet sand. Also, there's the other side of the first torii gate.


There happened to be a couple getting wedding photos taken, lol.


More shrine.


A noh stage. I didn't think there would be one at a shrine. O.o But I don't really know much about noh.


Cool bridge. This used to actually be the entrance, but I guess they made where we came in the new entrance since tourist arrive from the ferry side so much now.


As we were exiting the shrine, we walked over this stream, and I thought it looked pretty.

From here, we basically were free to do what we wanted. However, since they had skyrope tickets for us (which we basically paid for when we paid the program), it would have been a complete waste to not take the ride, so most (if not all) of us headed to the loading area for the ride.


So tiny! This one was ours.


Away we go!


The view behind me.


The view in front.


The view behind me was much more interesting though. This was taken pretty much at the end of that line.

We hopped out and went straight to the next line, which took us from there to the top of Mt. Misen, which was a pretty short ride. This sky car was a lot bigger, but we had to stand the whole way. I didn't get a picture of the car itself, but this was our view:



We quickly arrived at the destination, and man was it gorgeous!!





Of course I had to get a photo with it.

I tried to take a video of the view, because it was just too pretty, but for some reason, my camera was snapping photos on the video setting, and wouldn't actually record anything. D: That was disappointing.

I really wanted to stay up there forever, lol, but it was hot, and the girl I was kind of tagging along with wanted to head down and get lunch/do other things, so we started heading back. We took the same sky trams back, and then walked down the mountain from the first loading place. Since I had bought some new batteries, I took a couple of pictures I had tried to take on the way up:




These fish were huge!


I think we took a wrong turn, because we didn't remember passing a place like this, but I thought it looked spiffy, so I took a picture.

Apparently I didn't take anymore photos until we got on our ferry to go back, but in the meantime, the girl I was with (who's name I don't even know orz) and I got lunch of nikuman (meat buns) which was DELICIOUS, and custard/flan soft cream, mmmm. It was yummy, though not very filling. Good thing I ate a big breakfast, lol. We both wanted to go down to the ocean, but decided not to. It would have been a hassle really, since we had no way of drying our feet, and we didn't really have time. I'm sure I'll get a chance to splash around in the water eventually. In any case, by the time we were close enough to do anything, it was high tide and there wasn't really any beach to go on. Oh well. We were one of the first to return to the meeting grounds and chilled inside the ferry ticket place with a few others. When it was time for everyone to get together, no one else had come, so we started to worry and tried to figure out where everyone else was. Someone finally called the girl I was with and said they were out by some trees, because the CIEE staff wanted to get a photo of everyone by the ocean, so we wtf'd because no one told us to meet there instead, but headed out there anyway. That ended up being pointless because they didn't take a picture, lol. Whatever. We all gathered there and then went straight back to the loading area and waited for our ferry to arrive. We boarded and headed back to the first area (which I guess is Miyajima too? I'm not entirely sure).




Upon our arrival, we boarded back onto our bus and went to Hiroshima station.


Noooooo. D:



Then our Tokyo-bound Shinkansen came. D: