Saturday, July 18, 2009

Fun with Yuko

One of the English teachers from school, Yuko, offered to take me to her dance lesson. She studies Nihon Buyo, a traditional Japanese dance which she performs on stage. It was so nice of her and her teacher!

First, we spent a lot of time eating cake and watching their past performances.



Then the ladies dressed me up in my new yukata, which her teacher gave to me.





After posing for lots of photos...




...we were ready to dance.



After about half an hour, sensei decided to take us out to dinner. She was so generous.




We came back and practiced some more:





It's harder than it looks!




Then the ladies did their dance...




And we had more iced tea and treats.



Yuko drove me home so she could snoop in our apartment


and say hi to Simon.




Here's some of Yuko's calligraphy




Then to say thank you, I joined her after school kids' class. It was a nice break from high school kids. They were so sweet!









They we're very excited about bingo.


Mums

After class the boys ran off to play (cah, typical), but the girls stayed and asked me questions like "what's your favourite word?" and "what's your most important treasure?"


If my smile looks forced it's because this was the last of many photos.

Fukuyama no Architecture

In Japanese "Fukuyama no Architecture" means architecture of Fukuyama. Actually, they probably have their own word for architecture. But anyway, please enjoy my witty pun.









In Fukuyama, you can break it down into several sources of inspiration. I will outline some of these:


  • European inspired




  • Soviet Bloc inspired (very popular)




  • American inspired




  • Japanese inspired (also very popular, luckily)




  • Art Deco inspired




  • "Architecture" inspired




  • 70's inspired




  • English inspired




  • Pikachu inspired




  • Un inspired





Now, see if you can tell which genre has inspired the following buildings.














If you see a building with no windows, it's a Pachinko parlour (slot machines).















A wedding venue

Holy Zion's Park St Valentine









Transformers?

There was a really good one here last week - I just missed it.