Live Performances Round Two, and Skateboarding

So, my friends pressured me into buying a skateboard, which was not the smartest financial decision, and now I have to figure out how to fly it back in my luggage or something. Anyways, it cost me like $100, so hopefully I can get it back, or sell it if possible. I should have checked some of the hardware oriented thrift stores first, that would have been a smarter idea. Actually anyways, one of my friends had mentioned this awesome skate spot in front of a temple, in between a large park. It was a good spot to skate late at night because there were few cars going down the road, and it was far enough away from any houses to be a concern for a noise complaint, because skateboarding is actually illegal in all of Kyoto because of the noise it creates. However, Ethan said that this spot had been sanctioned due to its location and the nature of the surroundings, so myself and the guys were pretty excited to try it out. We all met up at the spot around 10 PM on Tuesday and were having a blast. I'm still very new to skating so I was working on figuring out board balance and the basics, but towards the end of the session was making some decent progress towards leaning the ollie. I hope I spelled that right.

Around midnight, a cop car pulled up. We all stopped skating and awkwardly stood around as two middle-aged male cops approached us. Although some of us in the group could speak good Japanese, we decided to bank on pretending we didn't understand in hopes that they were just checking in on us, since we were under the impression that the spot was a safe place for skating. Ethan had told us he frequented the area, and often Japanese people would be skating there on weekends. Unfortunately, these cops weren't going to have it, so in very broken English they told us that this spot, and any other spot nearby was no good. They drove off and we all started talking, confused by the conflicting information. Unfortunately we had some other friends who were currently on the way, so we decided we would at least hang out until they showed up, so we kept talking.

The friends showed up, and since we figured we had just gotten spotted by a random patrol, we went right back to skating. About an hour later, two more cops showed up on scooters. These guys were much younger, and Gibson decided to speak to them in Japanese this time. They told us it was perfectly fine to skate there, as long as we weren't super loud. They checked our ID cards and our bags to make sure that we didn't have any "dangerous items" on us, and then wished us a good night and took off. In my experience, Japanese cops are extremely friendly and not threatening whatsoever, especially compared to cops in America. Even the older men who had told us to stop skating had been very polite about it. The younger guys were having fun asking us questions about why we were in Japan, where we were studying, etc. One of them even complimented my earbuds after I had to pull them out of my pocket for him to check (since they were anime themed) and was stunned by the prepped food I had brought as dinner (a massive amount of chicken and noodles) and asked if I was a body builder haha. We enjoyed the rest of the night, and I probably didn't bike home until around 2:30 AM.

Three highlights of the week before I get to my live show: ramen,ice cream, and helldivers! I went to this crazy ramen place where you got to pick all of the ingredients that you wanted and put them into a bowl yourself, where they would then charge you based on the weight of your ingredients and cook it up. The broth was some of the best I've ever had, and unfortunately I was unable to finish my ramen. However, I took it home in a container and used the broth to make some of my own chicken and ramen later on in the week. Yifan, Osan, and I went to a fancy ice cream parfait shop on Tuesday. There were way too many options on the menu, and we probably spent 15 minutes just trying to decide what to order. The stuff was good, but a little pricey. A good fun treat to enjoy though. To catch up with my friends back home this week, I played some Helldivers2 with them while chatting about life, and did a little drinking while we played. I don't have much else to add here, but it was fun and made me happy, so I thought I would include a picture.

Saturday I had my last three live performances. First was OneOkayRock, a Japanese boy rock band that mainly sings in English and has a very American style. I found out that Ed Sheeran actually wrote some of their songs, and it made a lot of sense after hearing them. This group was Keisuke on vocals, Karin on guitar, and Fuui on drums. The first song is "The Beginning", and the second is "Re:make".

Next was my performance of SHISHAMO, a JPOP girl band, and we played “恋する”, which translates to "love" in English. Our singer was Mahiro, drums was Tomoka, and Ruiko played the guitar. Although not the most exciting song, this one was by far the grooviest. The bass part was simple mechanically, and a lot of fun to play, but difficult to memorize because the song was so long, and there were a lot of different parts to it. The video was too long to be sent to me in one piece, so they had to chunk it up into two parts.

My final performance was Green Day!!! Chase sang, Rinrin played the drums, and Naoki played guitar. Out of all my groups, this was the one that was the most prepared. Because of that, we changed up "American Idiot" and included a looped call and response section right before the guitar solo. Because the bass lines were pretty easy, I was able to have a lot of fun on stage headbanging and such. The other piece we played from them was "Basket Case".

After that show, I once again went out with Kai and friends! This time, we didn't stay super late and made the last train. I woke up Sunday morning conflicted: I had bought a ticket to a JPOP concert for that evening, which meant I was missing the final performances from this round of live shows from my club. The group that I had bought the ticket for was good, but wasn't my favorite, and I was thinking about how I was going to go all by myself, not so much fun. I decided that I would rather skip that concert and go to my club's show and have a much better time, socialize with friends, and enjoy more music for a longer period of time! I believe I made the right choice, because the final performances of that day were all done by senior players, and they were really good and extremely entertaining.

We went out to an izakaya once again after the show ended, this time with about 20 people. We ordered a lot of food and drinks, and were at the place for about three hours, and didn't leave until 1:00 AM. At that point, everyone was stuck in downtown Kyoto (Shijo) until the trains started running again. We debated what to do, and I suggested we go to karaoke, which turned out to be a great idea and was an absolute blast! Somehow we managed to stay alive and awake for another four hours by singing our throats dry. Not something I would do every weekend, but I'm really glad I decided to go to that performance instead of the one that I paid for! A much better experience, in my opinion.