Going out with style

So this is it….

Thursday, the day before my last day I was taken to a summer festival for some location filming.  It was a special festival at the Ikutama shrine.  Very nice.  My first japanese summer festival.  The food was pretty good.  Nothing too abnormal.  Most of the stuff is actually pretty good.  They even had the pancake balls I love.  The weird thing is the games.  They have the normal “knock prizes over to win them” games and then they have the “catch a baby chicken in the bag and keep it” game.  They had alot of those kind of things:chickens, goldfish, hermit crabs, EELS.  The eel one was definetely the weirdest because you had to hook the eel on a line and reel him up.  Everything else you had to catch, the eel you had to stab.  So besides the booths and all the girls in summer kimonos, which is so cool to see, the temple activities were cool too.  I had the temple….guys(they weren’t monks so I don’t know what to call them) bless me with good luck.  It involved them singing, clapping and then bitting me on the head with a fake dragon.  Then I got a good health stamp on my arm.  Then, for good measure, I got it on my cheek too.  MY FACE CHEEK.  I found out later that only kids or really crazy, cool guys get stamps on the face.  ALRIGHT, crazy cool.  So I walked around with my stamped up, dragon bitten body until it was time to work.  At night there was a ceremony involving a long parade of musical children,  a wagon with drums and chimes being pulled around,  and 2 giant shrines being sprinted around by some guys.  It was all very vast and very hectic.  So I am on the side taping from a safe position when my boss runs up to me and says something like “Andrew, your a camera man.  Go get the good shots.” and he pushes me into this giant mess of people.  So I am running around, ducking and dodging people and kids trying not to get trampled to death will taping the whole event.  I see my boss running in front of the shrines and I am just impressed that he isn’t killed.  Then after all the mayhem is done the real event gets started.  They pulled out this giant wooden wagon with a huge drum in the center.  The thing had to be about two car lengths.  After they pulled it into the center 6 guys dressed in all japanese style garb jumped up on the wagon and started playing the drum in the center.  Then the wagon starts getting moved around the shrine.  It starts out moving slow enough but then they really start to pick up speed.  Then all of a sudden the pull it around in front of the shrine and do a full out sprint towards the shrine.  I am standing right next to the shrine so I saw the following very clearly.  I thought they were going to turn at the last second.  Instead, I see a lot of the guys in front of the wagon sliding and trying to stop and this massive wagon while the back kept pushing.  I just stood there and was like “Is that thing about to crash into the shrine and all those people? It is going to stop in time right?” WRONG.  That thing came flying in there at like 5-10 miles an hour, full force.  I heard a loud slame and a lot of people scream.  I look over real quick to see that the wagon has hit the first steps of the shrine and stopped and all the people who were standing there are trying to recover from the shock of a 1 ton wagon crashing a foot in front of them.  And the whole time the drumers were still druming.  I was so happy everyone was okay and thinking that it couldn’t get more exciting after that.  I just want to say at this point that everyone really needs to go to at least one summer festival in their lifetime.  So the wagon pullers pull the wagon forward a little and push it close to the different crowd.  As soon as they get it over there they all run to run side and flip the thing over about a foot away from the crowd.  I am not joking, they ran up and flipped the sucka.  And once again the crowd screamed and dove for cover.  They did this a couple more times.  They did this with the drummers still in the cart.  In fact the drummers never missed a beat, they just kept on druming.  The scariest part was the guys whose job it was to duck under the cart and catch the drumers on his back. I thought he was going to get crushed by the cart more than once.  That was my last real day of work.  Not too bad.

My last day of work was too sad to go into great detail.  There was one point were a boss of mine gave me a real good handshake and I almost lost it.  But everyone gave me amazing parting gifts and we all got to take one last picture together.  Unfortunately, there was a major event going on so many of my friends at work had to leave early that day.  The ones who were left though went out with me after work and got some sushi and drinks.  It was a great way to end an internship.  I am just glad I won’t have to wear that suit anymore.

The next day I got up early to go to Universal Studio Japan with my old friend bart.  It was his birthday the week before and this was probably the last time I see him for a long time.  So we went to USJ together with the two free tickets that I had recieved from work(gotta love the free swag).   But thanks to the typhoon that was coming in it was raining that day(just like it had been raining everyday).  So Bart and I walked around and went on whatever ride wasn’t closed down that day.  It was surprising to see how many people still came despite the rain.  I guess when you don’t get many days off you gotta do what you gotta do.  Pretty fun but everything was in Japanese so suffice to say it was all a little off.  Especially seeing all the american sceens dubbed over into japanese.  After getting completely soaked we grabbed some sashimi and parted ways with one final goodbye.

Then we got hit by a typhoon.  I don’t remember much because like most natural disasters I slept through it.  Now its time to pack and get out of here.  See ya soon

t-minus 4 and counting