We went to see a Noh play but it turned out to be a recital of various Noh cantos. It went on for a long time and was very boring. I left and got a crepe. There were a bunch of schoolgirls at the crepe place who invited me to come see them in a parade at the Heian Jingu. It was Kyoto's intercollegiate Student Festival and it was kind of crazy there.
Here is one of the rows of stalls at the festival. When I walked down this row I was the only foreigner there and the Japanese students working the stalls were very excited to see me. Actually, they decided to ambush me. Four or five girls jumped out of a stall holding a huge sign in Japanese, and they charged at me waving it up and down. "Yakitori!" they yelled. The objective of this guerilla action was to impress upon me a stick of fried chicken for $3.00. Fortunately, I pushed through and had curry for $2 instead.
Here is the parade... the torii at this shrine is really quite large and difficult to capture properly in a photo.
In honor of the 1000th anniversary of the writing of the Tale of Genji they dressed up in kimonos and waved fans. It seems a little random, but hey, I don't know what I would have done in order to celebrate a book. Maybe pass out free copies.
Then over five thousand students gathered in front of the shrine and did the same dance. Yeah. I am having trouble comprehending this photo even though I took it. It is actually more mind-boggling than how it looked in real life because it makes it seem that they are all performing it perfectly ad-hoc. In reality they had various levels of practice and it showed.
The Noh recital lasted three and a half hours; getting back home took another hour and a half, and then I went to my part-time job at the Long Island Cafe. I didn't take any good pictures of that. I chatted in English with Japanese folks and I told them about corn subsidies and how Sarah Palin was crazy. Maybe I could have picked easier topics.
