So, more of school. Last Friday we had our

I totally went into the beginning of this month thinking that this was a cultural festival, but that was a dirty, dirty misunderstanding. This was the chorus festival, in which all of the classes compete against each other in singing. Much like with the Sports Festival, the competition was in-year, with each class competing against the others (e.g., Class 2-1 versus 2-3 and all the other 2nd years). However, because my school has been laid out by the pig flu, pretty much nobody had had enough time to practice. They actually post-poned the first years until the 26th, since half of the first year classes were sent home last week.

Basically, each year sings one song as the entire year, and then they split up and each class sings their song one-by-one. In another case of "Japanese school kids get way more responsibility for their own lives" the accompanist and the conductor for each class were students chosen from within that class. (Man, a lot of these kids can play piano.)

The full-year songs both sounded pretty good, but some of the class songs were... extremely questionable. Mostly this is because it's a problem both when you can only use singers from within the class and when everybody has to sing. For example, one class had way more boys than girls. Since the girls tend to be more in tune/better singers (more practice at karaoke?) this was extremely unfortunate- the boys totally drowned the girls out pretty much the whole time and the song just sounded unbalanced. And then there were times when the girls were way to sharp, etc, etc. They were mostly alright, with a couple of pretty/really good and a couple of pretty/really bad.

Luckily, the teachers had to vote on how they thought each class did, so that kept me paying attention to most of the groups. ^^; I haven't heard the results, so presumably they'll be announced with the first year ones later.

Also, this past weekend the local university had their school festival, so I went to check it out with a couple of people on Saturday. It was a pretty good time- the couple contest was funny (sort of like cosplay contest, but you have to do it in pairs), and the dance competition was really good, especially when they had the guests/judges get up and dance. This one guy did the best robot I've ever seen, ever. It was pretty much awesome. XD

Now at school, where this week we have parent-teacher(-student) conferences, so everyday has only four periods, I have nothing really to do today. But I do have 7 classes again this week! (Seven- my lucky number?)