Well, that was painful. What's even better, I probably lost all my akafun pictures because I left my camera in the car most of the day. AND, their daughter and her 3 brats are in town and are downstairs howling and screaming. One of them is busy throwing a tantrum. I certainly hope they go back to the festival soon and don't come back. I made them bring me home early because I'd had enough. I just know my pictures are ruined. AND I have a test tomorrow. 8pm
They did go back to the festival and then I had a shower and dinner of rice and water. There are small children's backpacks in the living room with clothes in them and several large bags of clothes and baby crap in the shrine room. This is turning out to be a very shitty day.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Around 3am, there was a thunderstorm. My favorite, a storm at night. Host parents got up around 4:45am and no one was home when I got up at 9. I later found out that they'd all left around 6:30. I was told to be ready to go by 10 and packed my backpack in hopes of being able to study some time during the day. I also packed my camera in it. Sometime after 10, host dad came to get me and we picked up Jakobina and went to the festival grounds. It was quite hot and sunny and the rain was all gone. Like an idiot, I left my backpack and camera in the car, which was in full sun.
Since it was a potato festival, there were potatoes everywhere. There was a pyramid of potatoes and you could win a prize by guessing how many were in the pile. They were boiling and giving away hot potatoes with butter. There were also numerous food booths and small animals in pens like goats, sheep, ponies, and rabbits. One of the baby ponies escaped its pen and was running around terrified and squeaking. There was also a baby goat.
We were taken to a tent with tables and chairs and given Tshirts with a dorky yellow cartoon potato with arms and legs called 'potato-chan' and more stupid English. It said something like "HELLO POTATO CARNIVAL HEALTHY FESTIVAL". There was a stage which periodically saw action but for the most part, we sat around being hot and bored. There was this one act which was a live-action anime episode of some crap which was reminscent of Power-Rangers. They had incidental music, dialog, evil, sound effects, and silly costumes. It looked to be carefully choreographed to a soundtrack, but one of the sound guys was hitting buttons on a sound machine and grunting into a microphone everytime a punch or kick was thrown, so I don't know how it was done.
Host mom had told me that we would come home and change into our yukata for the odori, which is the arm-waving dance. It started at 6 and we still had not changed. Since we were basically tired of doing nothing, and I was in a really bad mood because I'd remembered my camera around 3:30, I finally asked if we could be taken home. Host dad brought us home and when we parked in our driveway, the daughter was there in a minivan with her stupid annoying kids. In the 15 minutes or so that they were here, they were running all over the house and one was pitching a fit. I saw and smelled a dirty diaper in the kitchen (lovely, huh?) so I'm wondering if there are still only 3. Maybe she produced yet another one. I wonder how long this particular hell will last.
All I've had to eat today was a lot of potatoes, some yakitori, and some rice. I wanna go home.