Isahaya Nonnoko Festival

This weekend was the Isahaya Nonnoko festival.  On Saturday most of us ALTs did the traditional town dance through Isahaya, which involves clapping soy-sauce plates together in each hand.  On Sunday my taiko group performed in front of the “Spectacles Bridge,” the main landmark of my city.  While far from perfect, I think it was my best performance yet.  My friend Derek took very good quality of the whole show and I uploaded it to Picasa, but for some reason uploading it caused the quality to diminish quite a bit.  I’ll work on fixing that.  The third song is about the flood in 1955 that knocked down the bridge (you can make out the bridge behind us in the video).  The solo that two guys do on the big sideways drum represents the bridge crashing down, and the remainder of the song is us rebuilding it.  Check it out here.

The whole festival was a great time.  The weather was perfect, unlike last year when it was  ridiculously hot and muggy.  I also knew what I was doing better because I had by that point done it before.  I made some new friends and met a lot of my students.  This last part was great because since I live so far from where I teach and hence almost never see them outside of school.  And they are so much fun outside of school.