Sun’s Out, Lew’s About 🌞

Well, I brought it on myself but I have 1.5 months of content to catch you all up on! This blog post is filled with activities like summer sparklers, school festival, a trip to a theme park in Ishikawa and more. Without further ado, let’s get started!

So as my British readers will know, summer in England isn’t usually associated with fireworks. We save that occasion for November. So you won’t be surprised to hear that sparklers on a summer night seemed very different to what I’m used to.

In fact, every year in Japan, the summer is filled with festivals and fireworks to celebrate the summer. Every year that is, except for this year due to everyone’s (except anti-maskers’) dear old enemy COVID. Additionally, last year I was in England when the festivals and fireworks were happening, so I haven’t actually experienced a festival with fireworks while living in Japan. Anyway, that didn’t stop me and Rise from buying sparklers and enjoying them on a nice warm evening.

Using Rise’s phone, we got some nice shots.

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Despite it being strange not being wrapped up warm in a woolly hat and gloves, it was awesome and kind of romantic! ❤

Moving onto my school/work life, it was the school festival. If you don’t know already, I have a work buddy. We explored the school festival together and got a few pictures.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned the school festival last year, so if you check one of my previous posts, you can probably read about it last year too.

Students do up their homerooms with different themes and create activities for other students and teachers to enjoy. This year there were a few photo booths and challenge based activities to try out. My favourite activity was from class 21H. This was a Toy Story themed selection of minigames, including “find the green alien”, “fish for characters” and “memorise character shadows”. It was all great fun. 3rd grade students also do food. My favourite thing was the hurricane potatoes (I had 2). Once again, my favourite food has not changed from last year!

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Usually members of the public can join the school festival, however this year due to COVID, this was prohibited. If anyone is about during summer festival next year, come along!

Now, I didn’t actually realise until last month that there is a theme park in Ishikawa. It is called 手取フィシュランド – tedori fishland. It’s not a huge place but its filled with some pretty good stuff actually. To get there, it takes around 45 minutes on the bus from near my house.

Me and Rise got a ‘norihoudai’ or “all you can ride” pass for the day, which gave us unlimited rides on everything (but two turns on the go-karts). My favourite thing was the red roller-coaster. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything special from it, but it really went! Of course me and Rise put our hands up and screamed all the way around. There was also a big ferris wheel which was great, expect for the fact that it was swealtering inside the carriages due to the 30C+ heat outside. Check out some pics.

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Even though it was boiling on the ferris wheel, we did that as one of our final activities before taking a dip in the river while waiting for the bus home. The river was very refreshing and I felt “at-one” with nature.

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This theme park was great and I’ll go back for definite. Fab for residents of Ishikawa!

Next up is ホリ牧場 – hori bokujyo. 牧場 – bokujyo – means “farm” in Japanese. Me and Rise went there with our good friends Brandon and Yui. Amazingly, it was free entry. It was just a small place, but we were able to pet the animals including goats, donkeys and rabbits, all of which were incredibly cute. Rise gave one of the donkeys a very authentic Japanese name (sarcasm) – Tony! To be fair, he did look like a Tony! I did pay a small amount for some carrots to feed the animals, although they generally didn’t seem too hungry.

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  Rise and Tony

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Following petting the animals, in couples (me and Rise / Yui and Brandon) we did a corn maze! We raced around to see who would win. To my surprise, it was huge. It probably took about 20 mins total to go through. We separated quite early on into the maze, however we joined up very close to the end. It was a close one, but me and Rise won in the end! It was great fun.

After getting all hot and bothered after running aimlessly through the maze, we decided to cool down with some “famous” ice cream. It was yum yum and we even ate it in a hammock outside in the shade. Lovely.

That afternoon, we were invited to Yui’s family’s house for a BBQ. Her family were really nice and accommodating and the food was delicious. Take a look at it.

Unfortunately I don’t have any other pictures, but me and Rise had a whale of a time.

Onto my last main topic for this post. Me and Rise found a group of youtubers who do pranks on each other and became interested in their content during the course of last year. Since their YouTube career started, they also started to produce music and tour around Japan to perform in “idol” concerts. If you don’t know what a Japanese idol is, you can read more about idols here. In brief from the article:

In Japan, the term “idol” (アイドル) tends to refer to manufactured bands or singers; for a western parallel, think Backstreet Boys or Spice Girls.

https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/7063/

Anyway, this group is called 「おこさまぷれ～と。」- okosama pureito.

Me, Rise and her sister went to a live concert of theirs, which was great fun. Idol concerts are different to concerts you may be familiar with in that most people have glowsticks/light sticks coloured with their favourite members’ colour. Earlier in the day, me and Rise went to buy some glowsticks for the event. Rise had blue (for her favourite member しゅがー – Shuga), her sister had green (for のぴ – Nopi) and I had pink (for りあら – Riara). As you can expect, you wave these glowsticks around during the concert.

Back row, left to right: Chaki, Nopi.
Front row, left to right: Yuinya, Riara, Shuga

Due to COVID, the concert was held twice (when originally planned to be held once). Half of the people went to the first concert, the other half to the second. We were in the first half. At the concert, we were not allowed to sing/shout out (although I did once haha), we were only allowed to clap and we had to social distance by standing on designated spots on the floor. This made it more intimate though as there were only around 70 people there.

The music was great and we got to listen to a new song for the first time, 「キュン下さい」- kyun kudasai. Check it out below.

In addition, we bought some polaroid of the members (also a common thing to do at an idol show). Rise’s sister was lucky enough to get a picture with one of the members (it was a lucky dip dependent on the polaroid you got). Here are mine and Rise’s polaroids.

You aren’t permitted to record or take pictures during live concerts in Japan so I don’t have any pictures. Although the venue took a group picture, but they haven’t uploaded it yet.

Other stuff

There are been other various bits and bobs that we have done throughout the last month and a half. Instead of explaining, just check out the pictures in the slideshow below.

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  Sunset at the beach

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  Purikura

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  Friends

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  Kenrokuen Lightup

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  Don’t ask.

Finally, the last thing, me and Rise have started to use TikTok. Some of you know this, and we have appeared on people’s “For You” page. It’s something we are doing for fun. We didn’t expect to become so popular, but we have reached 7.8 million likes on the account so far. Even all of my students know the account and some of them watch my videos. It seems to be more popular in Japan because the content is in Japanese. We are both doing it for personally enjoyment more than anything! If you want to know the account details, just fire me a message.

So, that’s it for the post. I think I covered pretty much everything. Sorry it’s been a while. See you next time!