Adventures in a foreign country: Starting the holidays right!

This is going to be an extremely short post for me....

At last winter holidays have started!!!

At work we finished our winter celebration last week, our formal evaluations were also completed on Tuesday, and as of Friday evening, we were free!!

I went into Osaka to watch Colors to Cooks do a street live. It was a little chilly just standing outside, but right now the have lots of lights set out around Grand Front, so it's a really pretty atmosphere to listen to music.

On Saturday, I found out in the morning about a live from FASE and Shirata Shogo (who I met for the first time last month at the looper live) and one other person. I decided it would be fun to go, so I sent a message off to FASE and then was good to go for the afternoon! Definitely time well spent! This live was held at a really tiny place in Nishinomiya, which I've only been to once before, and it's kind of right below the train tracks, although surprisingly enough, the sound isn't a problem. When I got there the owner/someone's manager was so surprised because it wasn't a Yoshida Hiroki live (and I was trying to remember when I met her before...maybe at the looper live?) She was really nice though, she walked me out at the end and thanked me for coming, asked a few questions and then told me I'm really pretty. Aww.... And actually later that night, I got a message from FASE thanking me for coming and wishing me a nice holiday! Such nice people!!

FASE, Iwamura Kei, Shirata Shogo

This one was posted on Twitter...Shirata Shogo has a really interesting guitar...there isn't that normal large hole near the center...but rather a few smaller holes near the top of the body of the guitar...

Shirata Shogo's music. I like it. Click here if it doesn't work.

Saturday night, I met up with my friend for dinner and a chat (although it took us about an hour to find where we would eat because of closures and excessive line ups). Eventually we settled on a ton-katsu restaurant (called Katsukura), which was amazing!! I was so full after (probably because we took advantage of the free refills of tea, soup and rice ...not so much the cabbage refill though). I think we must have had 3 or 4 bowls of soup each (because it was so good) and two bowls of barley rice. Not to mention the main dish of a giant serving of cabbage, the ton-katsu (breaded, fried pork tenderloin) and a vegetable roll thing (which was super yummy!)

I took this photo from their website, since I forgot to take one myself...

After dinner, I was stuffed and took a bit of a walk to deal with it. I ended up wandering through Kitano-cho, the European village, and picked up a nice chai latte to drink along the way. It was very relaxing.

There's this one building decorated like a present with all these random Santas doing ridiculous things...and you can't even see it all in this picture.

Then, Sunday, I did some preparing for my trip, and then went into Shukugawa for the much anticipated cinema live from Yoshida Hiroki and Yamamoto Yoshinori. It was a lot of fun, and just as interesting as the last time. They must have had to practice a lot to get the timing right. And they did some rather funny acting at the beginning and around the intermission as well. Basically they were acting like they were just at someone's house watching movies and going with that conversation, but there was the video as well (of a tv in someone's room) and then it switched over to someone loading up a DVD right before they started their songs. Really interesting and fun!

Yamamoto Yoshinori and Yoshida Hiroki

This is a video from the last cinema live in July, maybe it can give you a better idea of what I'm going on about. If the link doesn't work, click here.

And that my friends, is the wonderful start that I've gotten off to for this year's winter holidays. Stay tuned for more updates soon!!!

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Also as an aside, I wanted to share a couple of photos from a walk up to Nunobiki Herb Gardens from a week or two ago!