Current mood:

jubilant

My life of late--and I'm coming home for Christmas!!
Hey all! It's been a while, but I'm doing preeetty good here. I'm in Tokyo right now, for my last little excursion for a while (not exactly cheap riding the shinkansen practically every weekend!!), and just got back from an AWESOME weekend in Kobe last weekend.

I went to Kobe to see Secret Box, the same play by the 4-man theater troupe *pnish* that I'd seen in Tokyo a couple of weeks before. All in all--I wound up seeing the play 6 times, because tsk, *pnish* is THAT amazing!!

This time I went with Meg, my friend in JET who lives up in Kinomoto, and met a Japanese girl I knew from Mixi (a Japanese blogging service) named Tenkuu-san. We also met another Japanese girl along the way who's really nice and sweet, named Chisato.

The four of us hung out together most of the time. Saturday evening was ANOTHER handshake event with the members of *pnish*, and I was a wreck by the time we finished XD Those guys are all just so AMAZING and SO nice, they're absolutely THRILLED to have foreign fans. After seeing the Sunday afternoon show, we had an hour or so to kill before seeing the last evening show, so the four of us hung out at Starbucks and talked and realized we had a lot more in common than we thought, and all exchanged phone info to keep in touch.

The very last show of a play's run is called senshuuraku and is usually the best one. I had gotten to see Aru Hi's senshuuraku at the beginning of September, but this one was COMPLETELY different. So many adlibs and flubs and just hilarity all around, because the guys were just having fun since it was the last show.

Meg had to leave early because Kinomoto's pretty far from Kobe, and she wanted to get home in time. Tenkuu-san lived in Fukuoka, the prefecture at the far southern tip of Japan, and so she had to leave immediately after the show ended to make her bullet train. So Chisato and I hung out afterwards waiting for "demachi"--where the actors come out after the end of the show and tell everyone goodbye.

Unfortunately, she didn't get to stay until *pnish* came out (because they waited until over TWO HOURS after the show ended!!), but she WAS there when one of the guest actors, a man named Katou Manabu, came out.

If you don't remember who this was, he's the actor I ran into randomly waaaaaay back at the end of July my first time out in Tokyo. I talked to him then and told him I was going to see this show, but he really must not have believed me.

Because when he came out, he was waving politely to everyone, thanking them for coming, but as soon as he spotted me, he stopped--did a double-take, and started SPAZZING OUT, seriously! He was pointing at me and going, "You came, you came!!" Out of the hundreds of girls there that night, he randomly remembered ME, who'd casually run into him in a store in Shibuya TWO MONTHS before!! Haha, best moment ever!

That was the highlight, pretty much, of my fun weekend in Kobe, and this weekend I'm going with Jen and her friend Nicolah to see a musical based on the anime Shounen Onmyouji ("The Young Exorcist").

Also--I booked my flight home for Christmas!! I'll get into Dallas at 5:10 PM Friday, December 21st, and will leave back for Tokyo at 7 AM Saturday, January 5th. Two glorious weeks in America :) Look me up when I'm back!!