chihiro

Holy crap, it is Thursday again already. This week has flown by. Maybe because I have been so tired and so I haven't noticed most of it due to at least partial unconsciousness. Wednesday I was in an English festival for a pile of elementary school kids. I had to play the part of a game show host and get the kids to pick which of two pictures was, for example, a banana. The most important part was really keeping the kids riled up and having a good time, which is not really my thing too much. But it was fun. It was very tiring though. The whole thing was like 10 minutes long but I was exhausted. This weekend my school is having a sports festival. They have been practicing for it all week. It is really spooky because it seems to more consist of fascist-type marching and sitting and standing and such drills than actual sports. This is why they need so much practice; to learn when to run here and bow here and all that stuff. It is creepy I tell you. They don't really play any real sports either. They do a jump rope contest where each class of 40 jumps on one rope, and they compete to see which class can jump the most times. Then they have tug of war and some relay races, which are the closest thing to a real sport. I am running twice in 100 meter relay races. This will be embarrassing. I am really more of a medium distance runner if anything, but really I am not much of a runner at all. Hopefully I can outrun 15-year-olds, especially scrawny Japanese ones, but they are pretty sprightly so no one can say for sure.

Oh by the way, Spirited Away is now in limited release in the United States and should be seen by everybody. The trailer is available here. The release is still limited, so for my Blatimore readers, the nearest available showing is in Mazza Gallerie (damn I used to see so many movies there in high school!) in Friendship Heights DC. If I was there I would definitely be driving down to see it. This is the highest grossing movie ever in Japan, foreign or domestic, and I really love it.