On Saturday we returned to Daishoji, where I proceeded to lose Daniel's house key...! Feeling awful, we rushed over to his landlord's place (again--everything's really close...) and her husband replaced it with two new ones free of charge. Good thing!
That night I participated in a children's Halloween party, which was taking place at a local english "juku", or preparatory school. The event was organized by the head teacher there, a woman who generously took Anna and I on the tour of Kaga a couple of months back. Anyways, the halloween setup they had there was amazing!!! They hit the nail on the head, which was made even more impressive when contrasted with the lack of anything halloween-related anywhere else. They had massive pumpkins, elaborate outer and inner decorations, a fully equipped haunted house, and games and activities for hours. Along with the head teacher's husband and a couple of Daniel's high school students, we manned the haunted house and did our best to scare the crap out of kids as they went through.
I was a vampire, and managed to scare myself a couple of times passing by mirrors, but more importantly, I scared little kids! Yay! It was great--they'd enter this creepy corridor after making it through about three quarters of the sufficiently creepy setup, so by the time they reached my area, there nerves would be on overdrive. The only light in the room came from a creepy flickering neon display case of severed heads, so they wouldn't notice the black bundle parked next to the wall. Then out of nowhere, I, the scary vampire, would pop up from under my cape with an unquenched thirst for blood, which was pretty successful.
It was fun to watch the kids' reactions. The organizers wisely thought to send the boys through first, who were too tough to get 'really' frightened. No screams, just really wide eyes O_O. Then they would recognize me and yell, "Mike-sensei!" and relax a little. The girls on the other hand, were really freaked out, jumping and screaming at everything. The worst was when two younger girls reached my room already in tears, so after reassuringly removing my fangs, I yelled ahead to call off the ambush at the end of the course. Just as a side note, practically all of the kids there were my students, so I think it surprised most of them to see my darker side. Better that they figure it out sooner rather than later.
Afterwards there was a mummy-wrapping race, then I gave a guessing quiz on halloween words, and then there were awards for funniest, scariest, cutest, and weirdest costumes. After it was all done, and everyone had gone home, everyone who had worked to make the party a success went out to Coco's for dinner and after pizza and quesadillas I had maybe the best sundae I've ever had.
This morning I got up 9:30-ish and biked down to Daishoji River, where a wedding procession had just arrived from the temple for the ceremony. It was a much-anticipated traditional wedding, and looked absolutely amazing. Must have taken hours for everyone to get as done up as they were. I'll post some facebook pictures. I'd heard about it from my landlord, who will have the honour of actually hosting the wedding banquet later this evening at his restaurant.
