外大際

This weekend was the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies festival, AKA, the 外大際 gai dai sai. It included a lot of live music and dancing and some cafe's and stuff. If you've ever seen the cultural festival episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi or - though any anime about high-school will have a festival episode or two - you know the basic idea.

I went on Saturday for a bit, but the act was not particularly good, so I left about only being there for about half an hour. They were supposedly doing go-go dancing, but it looked much more like para para than anything else. Further, they didn't seem to be really confident of themselves, but it was probably the first time they did their routine in front of a hundred (maybe two hundred?) people, so that's fairly understandable.
I took some pictures, but they didn't really come out well. The harsh sunlight was making it hard to get their faces to expose properly. If you look, you'll see the exposure bias was set to +2/3 stops, and I'm not really sure when that happened, but it's another thing I need to watch out for in the future. I very rarely use positive exposure biases.

After this, I went to a shiatsu lesson, but I wasn't in the right mood for it, and I felt like "Urgh, end already...". Probably because I stayed up until 5AM that day playing games with Yanavy, a French girl from my school's level two class. I think she speaks four or five languages fluently.

Wake up, go to club stuff, and got this picture of Melissa lookin' good, as she tends to do, while we were all getting ready to leave. Taken simply as an excuse to play with my new flash, though. The SB-600 has a head that both twists and rotate on the vertical axis, so you can do bounce shots while holding the camera vertically. I don't know quite what I did in this picture, because I certainly didn't bounce it. I guess it's direct flash?

Came back later on Sunday, around 7PM, and watched an hour of people dancing around. They were much, much better than the first group I saw, but they had quite a bit more invested in it and it was a larger group. This is probably why they were put on the main day of the festival during the peak of the students being around.

They had maybe eight different outfits for each of the ten or so different people, and a couple of times they just changed on stage behind a big pink tarp.
The thing that confuses me about this: where do you find a big pink tarp? That's not really a standard color for tarps, you know?

Now, I don't want you to think the entire set of dance routines was just a bunch of women in short skirts shaking their stuff around - though it was, for the most part.
Two guys came on stage and did some breakdancing, which I couldn't see due to being fairly far back. They looked fairly in shape, but they didn't really have any costuming, which might have helped.

They did a bunch of songs that I would consider serious for breakdancing, but they also did the theme song from 崖の上のぽにょ Gake no Ue no Ponyo which is pretty cutesy, as well as Cruel Angel's Thesis from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both were met with cheers.

One of the performances had this chick (right side of the left-aligned picture) in it, and she's probably the most buff Japanese woman I've seen yet. She also gets bonus points for being pretty cute anyway.

At the end, I saw a bunch of the dancers (right) kind of... dancing around, in the open, and I took the opportunity to actually get a picture of a few of the whole outfits.

I also spotted one of the other study abroad students trying to pick up some girls. I don't know how this turned out, but I think he was fairly drunk while they were fairly not. Note the expression of the girl to his right.

While the obon dance was going on, there was someone providing cues for the announcers, but I guess she didn't have them in a useful format to read from a distance, so she was furiously scribbling away on this big notebook and showing them their cues like that. Pretty nifty idea, I thought.