Taiko Festival

太鼓フェスティバル ! (Japanese festival involving large drums)

Yesterday, I witnessed a 太鼓フェスティバル ! (Japanese festival involving large drums) It was very neat. It was similar to an American band concert, except the only instruments involved were percussion, flutes, and the performers' voices. We attended the drum festival because Meg's little sister Yuuri is part of aJapanese drumming club. She is really great at drumming, and also an amazing flute player!

The traditional garments the students wore were super colorful and some were even super detailed. The music was surprisingly quite loud; you could feel the vibrations from the drums throughout the whole theatre. And it wasn't even all just drumming, the people danced and did cool tricks with their drumsticks! I had never before heard such a variety of overlapping rhythms played with mostly just drums.

At the end, all the different groups came back on stage and played one great encore together. This was super cool to watch, with all the different styles of song mixing to make one great, reverberating song. During that, there were two dragons made up of two people each that wandered down the aisles of the theatre pretending to swallow people's heads from the audience. I really liked the dragons! I thought they were cute.

Although the performance was very very long, I had a great time! It was amazing to watch because they were all so strong, and the age range was very wide! Some of them were super young little kids, all the way up to the professionals who had been playing for a really long time! It looked exhausting to be hitting those drums as hard as they were and as much as they were.

Afterwards, we went out to dinner to this place called Coco's. The best way to describe this restaurant, is a big mix of food cultures. There was quite the variety! They had many things from spaghetti, fried potatoes and steaks, to curry, jambalaya, and Japanese soups. For dessert I ate green tea matcha ice cream with mochi all topped with some funny little raw bean-like things. Still undecided about how I feel about mochi, it has an odd texture to me. But I love the matcha ice cream!

I think I love the food here a lot! It's for sure up there on the list of best things!

-Amaya