Taiikusai (Sport's Festival)!!

I completely underestimated the taiikusai. It is way more important to the girls than I though it was and it was way more fun than I had anticipated.

Maybe the reason that I wasn't really looking forward to it during the week leading up to it was how busy I was. My taiikusai was Saturday (the 23rd) and on Sunday morning I was changing host families. Both of these events required a lot of preparation. As you can imagine, things got pretty crazy for a while. Every day for about two weeks I had to get up early to practice our mukade (literally means centipede) race and relay before school started. On top of that I had some very late nights trying to get all my laundry done, things packed, and information deleted off my family's computer. That led to lots of blog updates and attempting to update pictures to Michael's website because I had to delete them all. Phew!! I also had to have all my preparations done on Friday because I was busy with my taiikusai all day on Saturday.

I had a blast with the taiikusai! I didn't totally fail at the radio exercises (see older post) like I thought I would. I dominated the 400m dash. My team, that practiced so hard for it, won the mukade. We won the tug-of-war. Our relay got 5th of 6, which is quite an emotional story. We won the kaso (skit-like performance) in which Perry was a hit! AND to top it all off, my class won overall!

Waiting for their race at the gate that leads onto the grounds.

The track is just over 100m, so my 400m was three and a half laps. I ran it in about 1 minute and 23 seconds (haha! My coach would KILL me if I ran that time in a track meet) and the other girls were about a half a lap back. It was fun. I could hear everyone cheering for me. It's like I am famous here. A lot of the parents were even yelling my name...

Getting ready to line up for the race.

My next event was the mukade. All of our hard work paid off as the last two legs our our team (it's a relay) managed to overtake the other team. There were lots of screams, jumping up and down, and then tears. Then I started laughing... partly because I was happy but more because it was fun to see my friends so happy about it.

Mukade. Yeah, it was intense.

Celebrating after winning the Mukade.

The tug-of-war was intense. There must have been at least 50 girls on each side. I the second one from the front on our side. We lost our first one, but won the rest. The team that beat us got disqualified for something... so we ended up taking first over all.

Mano-san and I showing off our red ribbons during our lunch break. (red mean 1st place in Japan)

The final relay was the most emotional race I have ever been in. Our original relay team had two girls from the basketball club on it, and those two are fast. However, the basketball team qualified for a game that day so we ran with a different team. The relay was going to be tough competition to start with and now that two of our fastest girls were gone, there wasn't really much hope. There had been hope that the basketball girls would get back before the relay started, but as it got closer to race time they didn't show up. The rest of the relay team was crying before the race even started. The overall points were close, but they didn't have them up anymore so there was a bit of pressure on the team. We ran hard and tried our best. I actually think that that is the fastest I have ever run a 100m. It felt fast at least. At the end, it wasn't enough. We got 5th place. And then the girls really cried. I almost cried! We thought we had let our entire class down. Everyone was thrilled when they announced the final point totals and we had won first place. And, you guessed it, there were more tears of happiness.

Our Kaso also got first place. We had awesome costumes and the whole idea of it was really good, I thought. The other classes' were good too though. When I made my exit as Commodore Perry the crowd started clapping and I hear several "oh, Perry!"s. I couldn't help but smile. It was really fun, actually.

Me as Perry, Risako (left) and Shibu-chan (right) as my henchmen.

After the taiikusai I ran home, took a quick shower, and left for Yokohama station for our after party. We went to Shakey's Pizza, an "American" pizza and pasta buffet place. It was so good and I ate a ton! It was really really fun to see all the girls outside of school and uniform. Everyone took tons of pictures.

Shakey's pizza. And this wasn't even half of the girls.

I got home at 10:30 (the only time I was past curfew at this house... On the lastnight) but my host mom didn't care at all. I called her from the station to tell her ahead of time. Then I stayed up for a few more hours writing letters for my host family and getting stuff ready for the morning.

My only taiikusai experience I will ever have was a really good one.