This weekend was much more tame (most of it anyway) than my last week was. However, a group of us did leave town for the weekend. Some first years in Tonami decided to have a little shindig for other first years on the west side of Toyama prefecture. Tonami is about an hour by train from Toyama city. A girl from Oyama, which is actually on the east side of Toyama met the 4 of us (Marcus, Sarah, Victoria, and I) in Toyama, and she had our whole route planned out to Tonami. Unfortunately, she didn't notice one of the trains we were supposed to take was actually and express (it costs three times more), so we didn't get on our first train, thus messing up the next train too. We ended up in Tonami about two hours after our intended time. Oh well.

When we got there, everyone was eating at a yaki-tori place. Yaki-tori is basically meat cooked on a stick. It is similar to tiny shish-ka-bobs. Since we got there at 10:30pm, we actually had already eaten during our long train wait in Takaoka. We dropped our backpacks off at an ALT's house in Tonami. She had a huge apartment, with three separate rooms. Any one of her rooms was as big as my main room. When we came back to the center of town, everyone had moved on to a karaoke bar instead of the yaki-tori place. We had a lot of fun at the karaoke bar, but it closed at 1am, so we got kicked out. Then some of the people who were driving home left, and the rest of us moved on to another karaoke place, but this one had a bunch of private rooms. So we rented a room and started singing again. This time many people were much more drunk, so it really sounded horrible at many points. I was singing "Patience" by Guns and Roses and Susan, one of the hosts, was really drunk. She decided to sing with me, which was a lot more like shouting than singing. At one point she turned to me and asked if my mic was on since she couldn't hear me. It was really funny, but also pretty horrible. To make sure she couldn't ruin a song Victoria was going to sing, I had to hide the spare microphones and tell her I couldn't find a microphone to sing with, could I please borrow hers. Hey, it was a little deceitful, but it worked. After an hour of that, we went home around 3am. Being the most sober person, I ended up leading Jackie back to her own apartment. Good thing I have a good sense of direction, since I had only been there once. Jackie only figured it out once I got her pretty close to her apartment. Everyone kind of collapsed on the floor for the night.

Saturday morning we woke up really late (actually really early first since Sarah's cell phone alarm kept going off) and were pretty much bums for most of the morning. Around 2pm we got dropped off by Susan at the Apita, a big grocery store/ shopping mall area. There we ate some food and waited for our ride to Toga Village to show up. Laura D. agreed to take us to Toga if we paid for the gas in her car, so that sounded better than the 2400 yen each for the round trip journey by bus. She picked us up about 4 and we went to Toga. Toga is a tiny village of 950 in the mountains. It is about the smallest town in Toyama Prefecture, but they have this big drama festival for two weeks where they do many different plays in Japanese with lots of different actors. There is a JET in Toga, a CIR (think cultural assistant instead of a teacher) named Daniel. He has a huge house which is oddly shaped, but big enough to fit many people. He was able to get many free tickets to the last night of the Toga festival for many JETs, ourselves included.

We made it to Toga in about an hour, and beat the other 25 JETs who were supposed to come also. Many of them were late, and some missed the performance entirely. The performance was about the history of Japan, I think. It was all in Japanese, so I didn't understand much. It had a bunch of guys in wheelchairs though who were pretty funny. Also, they had guys wearing gray makeup and gray traditional clothes that were there. They also dressed up in other things sometimes too. The two most impressive things were the way they overdid many of their expressions and lines. It was similar to silent film in that regard (though not the lines part obviously). Oops, the second impressive thing was the fireworks display. They used fireworks throughout the play and it was very gorgeous. That night about 13 of us stayed at Daniel's place. I think he gets a little lonely being up there, so he enjoyed the company.

The next day we went to a fishing festival in Toga (good timing, huh?) where they dump lots of little fish in the river and people catch them with their bare hands. It was a lot of fun, and I managed to catch a couple which I gave away to the tons of little kids all swarming around us, since we were the only non-Japanese there. Sarah was hilarious because she really wanted to catch a fish but was petrified about touching one. It made for some hilarious shrieking and fish mayhem. Most of the caught fish faced a gruesome death at the end of a sharp stick, but Victoria's fish, Gilbert, was lucky. She spared him and let him out downstream.

After the festival, we went to a meditation center, and basically bummed around for another two hours. They had some large mandala paintings which were interesting at the center. Then we were going to go home and Daniel gave us faulty directions, so we got totally lost and ended up on a tiny mountain road with a cliff next to us. We had to keep driving over waterfalls too. Luckily we ran into a guy who was really nice and not just gave us directions, but drove us all the way back to Toga and put us on the correct road. However, the drive was really scary and we were not anxious to repeat it. We didn't have much choice though. There was a lot of fear in the car, but we were fine. I wasn't too worried, except that Laura was from Texas and was not used to mountain roads at all. The drive took almost three hours because of our detour.

So that was my exciting and relaxing and scary and strange weekend.