I’m still waiting for internet in my room! It should be coming very soon though… The bad news is that the wireless spot outside my room vanished, so now I need to start taking longer walks in the hot sun to find internet… oy!

So now is my summer vacation. (Vacation after only 1 and a half weeks of work! How nice!) So far I’ve spent it finishing Harry Potter 7, buying a bike and exploring Takefu a bit, and more roaming around. I found a movie rental place, and rented Tales from Earthsea (done by Hayao Miyazaki’s son) and Eragon. Eragon was trash, but Earthsea was fantastic. The score was beautiful, and the backgrounds were too. I wasn’t enthralled by the story, as it was pretty compressed and changed from the books, but it was still quite good (and much closer than the tv version was). I’ve also been recommended Kokkurisan by some of my students. It’s a horror movie, and by the looks of it I’ll have to be watching it alone since I haven’t met anyone here who likes horror movies yet… Oh well! I hink Ju-On has scarred me to the point where I can’t feel truely scared anymore.

On Saturday I went to the fireworks festival up in Mikuni. It was a long treck — first on a very slow local train to Fukui to meet Hiro and Minako, then onto another very packed train all the way up to Mikuni on the coast. But this is apparantly the most famous festival in Fukui prefecture. It was so crowded! Mikuni beach was gorgeous, but there was literally not an inch of sand that wasn’t covered in a sitting cloth… I’ve never seen a beach that crowded. But it was kind of fun to see that many people jammed together. There were also stalls selling food everywhere, so the whole place smelled great. (Ooh, I had omu-soba and matcha water ice!) The beach was also lined with gorgeous ryokans which were all booked solid for the festival. So we got there really early and had to sit baking in the sun for many hours, and our seat was on the very far back of the sand… even so, we could see the fireworks fine. The show lasted an hour and was quite fun. An announcer talked a lot (a bit too much) about the fireworks, and we saw lots of shaped fireworks — doraemon, smiley faces, hearts, Saturns, plenty of birds and flowers. There were even huge fireworks blasted up from underneath the ocean, and sideways fireworks that were so pretty. I took lots of photos, and I’ll post them soon — but unfortunately I can’t get my cellphone to connect easily to my computer with bluetooth, so for now I can only send photos to my computer one by one… a bit too slow for the amount of photos I took. (A computer problem that I don’t know how to fix! >_< Wow! Now I know how the rest of the world feels.) Besides, for now my way of posting to my blog is a bit too inconvenient for uploading photos to my website.

I had practice for the Bon Dance (Remember Karate Kid 2?) yesterday, and the festival here in Takefu is on Wednesday. I’m so glad I have summer vacation and can do all of this! Today I’ll probably relax here at home and draw — I’ve decided I want to do about 1 picture a week if possible (I highly doubt that’s possible), which means I’ve got a lot of catching up to do! So right now I’m working on one of Nagoya castle on my tablet, and I’ll do one of the Mikuni fireworks festival too when I’m done this one… after that, who knows. They won’t all be spectacular, I’m sure, if I manage to keep up the pace of 1 a week, but I can’t let laziness take over. Besides, when I return to Philadelphia I’d like to be able to actually work as an illustrator or something art-related at least part-time, so having a decent body of work is a requirement to start that up.

So I’ve got to go find an internet connection to upload this post now… I’ll post some photos and videos up here after I’ve got internet in my room. Thanks for reading!

Update: So here are more photos from Takefu’s Bon Odori. There I am decked out in a yukata, and then as you can tell by the blurry photos, I danced as well! The next day Takefu had a fireworks festival, which l went to see: