Instant Camp / Firework Show to End ALL

Got off the bus with the drama club on Wednesday only to find out that the bus stop was a decent walk away from the place were were going, Yamahana Autocamp. Having done the walk, I would guess about a mile. (I'm no GPS system, though, so don't take my word for it.) The walk was uphill part of the way and downhill part of the way, and plagued with bugs the WHOLE way. Wasps, bees, mosquitoes, butterflies, and cicaidas, to name the ones I know where there. Man, cicaidas are loud. I was the only one surprised by them.

When we got to Yamahana, we were a bit early for check in so we goofed off by the main lodge. Played a variation on the Japanese version of the kids' game Red Light, Green Light that involved a lot of silly poses and explanations for how, exactly, that silly pose had something to do with fireworks or whatever had been called out. Good times.

After we went to our cabin, three of the girls started making dinner (curry rice, and man was that tasty). Most people went to the hot springs while dinner was cooking, but Haruki was feeling a bit ill, Shirakawa was watching the food, and I was damned if I was gonna go to a hot spring in that heat, so we stayed behind. I slept. Haruki Slept. Shirakawa did something in one corner. It was a nice, lazy afternoon. We had dinner, then did stuff with fireworks. It was pretty much all sparklers, since anything with a decent chance of catching the grass on fire was forbidden. There were these tiny fireworks that did neato sparkly things in your hand that I actually liked way better than the sparklers.

Then we all went up to the second floor (which had been off-limits to all but a few until then) to find it set up for ye olde drinking party. They surprised me by starting off with some stuff for me -- a plaque that everyone had written a bit on, including one guy's mini Suzumiya Haruhi fanart for me, some pictures that one guy had printed out for me because I ended up not having my camera with me when we were doing group pictures after the play, and (from the people at my school, specifically) two Japanese scripts with English translations in them. All of these things were bloody awesome.

It was followed by a round of self-introductions, which I've become convinced is one of maybe four drinking games the Japanese have. The second drinking game they have is to use the superlative votes everyone came up with and have the winners drink. The fourth is to have everyone take guesses at fairly random questions and have the losers drink. I leave room for a fourth drinking game because I'm sure there is one, but until the trip with the drama club, I had only ever seen self-introduction as a drinking game.

After that, people pretty much drank, munched, and eventually fell asleep. I ended up watching an anime on TV (yeah, the place had a TV) with Hirokawa at some point before sleeping on the tiny couch. That couch was really comfortable in spite of being tiny.

In the morning, we packed up, cleaned up, and left. Another hellacious walk back through the bugs later, we hit the bus stop and went back home. All in all, it was a great deal of fun.

Yesterday, Yuuji, Arima, and I went to Obihiro. Obihiro is a bit south of Kushiro, and is Yuuji's hometown. It's also home to a fireworks show every August that is famous throughout the country. Yuuji said it's about the 4th biggest yearly fireworks display in Japan. One of the newspapers siphons money towards the budget for it all year, and it's a multi-billion yen (multi tens of millions in US dollars) operation.

It looked it.

It was the most impressive fireworks display I've ever seen in my life. There was a local radio DJ MCing and about half the time was taken up by the MC and advertizing, but the other half of the 70-minute show was all fireworks. Thousands of fireworks. Big fireworks. Holy cow fireworks. It rocked.

Yuuji had wanted to drive me and Arima around town (which is why we left Kushiro at like 10 in the morning), but his car's alternator died when he stopped to go to the bathroom about 3/4 of the way to Obihiro. Luckily, it stopped just down the road from a car service/gas station, so they got his car running long enough to get us to Obihiro, but between that and the annual visit to the family grave he went to with his family the tour didn't really happen. We did get to see Yuuji's old high school on the walk to the fireworks viewing grounds, but apparently there were a lot of things he didn't get to show us. Our return to Kushiro happened in his older sister's car, who's apparently psychotic about keeping the inner car clean. There was a tray on the floor in the back seat to put my shoes in when I entered the car.