June 1, 2003
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There was a Satsuki Festival this weekend. I don't know exactly what it's about, but it's a big thing at Seika. It meant a lot of students set up booths along this street through campus and sold food or clothes or whatever. It was an interesting thing, but a little difficult. Everyone is very vocal about selling their wares, so it's all very loud, and I don't understand Japanese all that well when I can hear it clearly. For a little while, I tried to be polite about not buying things, but it seemed to cause confusion, so I stopped. I would just look the other way or not say things.

I ate a lot of rice, fried on sticks, with seaweed inside, covered in walnuts, etc. Some fried dough. Croquettes are reasonably popular here. I had some of those. Patrick and I played some Jan Ken, for money. It wasn't even really a booth, just a guy who Patrick found, I guess. There were two of them, and they were both really good at it somehow. Patrick can usually beat a person a good three out of four times or more, but this time he was on a losing record. Eventually he won back a big pile of money (I don't know if he broke even with it, but whether he was up or down, it wasn't by much). It was on one throw, where he was betting his shoes against all the money that was out. I turned out well for him, I guess. I lost only forty yen, but I didn't play as long as Patrick did.

We went to watch Hiroshi's band. They call themselves Chuck Norris and write political songs. They're all in English, and we looked at their lyric sheets once. It was hard to interperet sometimes. It doesn't really matter, though, when they sing, because it's a hardcore metal band or something, so the vocals are mostly screamed instead of sung, and they're kind of drowned out by the guitars. It was very cool to see, though. They really get into it.

Also, I was pleased to find that ccs64, my Commodore 64 emulator for windows, will run in linux under wine. Wine is a program for running windows applications, but the only things I've ever gotten it to run are notepad and winamp, and I don't need winamp, and even though it technically runs, it can't play music anyway. The C64 emulation, however, is very nice, with sound and everything. I realized, though, after I started playing some things, that what I really wanted to play was Legend of Zelda. Still, it's nice to know that I can get back to the Commodore anytime I like.