What is this I don't even

There's been a cool change this week, both in the weather and our level of activity, which is probably for the best in both cases. "Silver Week" has just wrapped up, a dual-public-holiday week that was spent gloriously far away from Tokyo and its wallet incinerators. Most notably, Friday was the Sports Festival at one of my schools, which in short is an insane version of the sports carnivals we have at home, featuring tricycles and cardboard box tank treads.

You probably still won't understand when I explain it.

Autumn has abruptly hit Japan, with the coming of the perfectly timed "Autumnal Equinox" on Thursday, which switched the weather like a light switch from hot and sticky to cool and windy. Lisa's found herself having to reissue packing advice to her parents for the weekend; we couldn't imagine ever having to wear long sleeves again a week ago, but now it's starting to seem a bit chilly without them. We marked the holiday by going out for a wander around, knocking off niggling chores and poking around the sales, all of which put me in a thoroughly good mood. "I just really like Kobe," I said, rifling through the electronics shop in Harbourland, "I'm happy here, I think."

Friday, I showed up to school for the Sports Festival in my finest gym gear, just in case they made me compete in anything. "You look very fit," the Principal said enigmatically, before disappearing down the steps for his introduction. The band struck up and the students started marching around the field in groups, passing by a very dictatorial Principal on top of his stand and lining up in "regiments". One of the students barked a command and the whole group spread out evenly in seconds, starting their warmup to some very outdated sounding music; once that was done, they split off and jogged around to their seats at the back of the ground. First up were the straight running races, with each class (indicated by a different coloured headband) competing against the others, provided they could stay on their feet long enough. I'm astonished how often the girls fall down here - we had at least 10 stacks throughout the day, probably because they think it's "cute" to run pigeon toed (until you land on your face). Next up was the tug of war, which was misleadingly normal, followed by a few relays. Melissa competed in a 5 legged race, where she found herself tied to 3 students and forced to coordinate legs. They did fine getting over the first hurdle but then one of their bindings broke, so they had to quickly improvise with one of the headbands and lost valuable seconds, losing their lead in the process. Then things got weird.

The next event we referred to as the "naked man race" - scores of the boys took their shirts off abruptly and sat waiting in rows. This was because it was "dangerous" to wear a shirt, they said, without offering much more information than that. It turned out that the event was "climbing a pole" - a big wooden post with a flag on top that was held steady by the crowd while several people tried to climb up at the same time. The starter gun went off and it was all bare feet and elbows for a while, before one intrepid explorer managed to clear the rabble and start climbing up the pole. The holders weren't doing a very good job though - it started to tip over and continued to drop until it was almost horizontal, which didn't seem to bother the climber. He snatched the flag, which was now about 5 feet from the ground, and a big cheer went up.

Clearly not satisfied with the danger level, next up was the horse riding event, where a student sits on the shoulders of two others and competes with other "horses" by trying to steal their hats. Being quite high and having quite a lot of argy-bargy going on often leads to some hazardous "dismounts", so a teacher has to accompany each horse and catch people before any heads collide with the ground. The boys in particular get very into this, which makes for some nail-biting stuff for the crowd. To finish the morning, the girls put on a cheerleading demonstration where they did the can-can, formed a big heart on the field and impressively spelled things out with their pompoms to a very annoying remix of "Pretty Woman". Not to be outdone, the boys showed off their human pyramid skills, finishing off with a cone-shaped one which saw the top one standing on the shoulders of others twice over. I'm really glad noone fell off, because they were a lot higher than they were on the horses.

The afternoon session kicked off with the club relay, a very silly event in which each club competed in costume. This meant the swim team were in speedos, the judo team were in gis and the horseriding club were in hilariously hard-to-run-in boots and jodhpurs. After a while they started having fun replacing the "batons" they were passing - from the mildly amusing kendo sword (kendo club) and kickboard (swim club) to the utterly ridiculous full-size school flag (cheer club) and crash mat (judo club). The latter was so hard to pass between one another that the judo club ended up about 3 lengths behind everyone else, opting to drop it down on the ground just before the finish line and throw the last member on top of it to "tag" him.

The event I was asked to join was the "ball toss", which involved standing in a big square and pelting foam balls at a student running around with a big box on his back. Each ball in the box was worth one point and I don't think I got a single one in, but I did manage to slow him down with constant "accidental" headshots (I claim credit for our victory). After that came the tyre grab, where two teams charge at each other Braveheart-like for the chance to grab the tyres in the middle and take them back to their base; at one point they were physically dragging a girl across the field by the tyre - that's commitment, as far as I'm concerned. After an alarmingly normal skipping competition, we were into the main event of the day, which I'm going to call the "ridiculous relay". It was an obstacle course of sorts with several different stages. Firstly, the competitors had to crawl in cardboard boxes taped together in a circle, giving the impression of a tank tread or conveyor belt with a person in it. Next, they had to stick their faces in a tray of flour to find a lolly inside, then it was on to some hilariously small tricycles to ride to the next stage. After crawling under a cargo net and balancing a ping-pong ball, they had to jump on to a chair to pop a balloon. Next up, the "bread eating" stage, where they had to jump up and pull a bread or pastry off a clothes horse using their teeth; finally, they pulled a placard out of a box and had to get someone out of the audience who matched the description on it to take them over the finish line. There really are no words for this, other than fghllblarrghl. All up it was a fun day and I feel that we could learn a thing or two about making our sports carnivals more exciting and bizarre.

There's very little news apart from that - times have been tough for the Mike and Lisa household since our big weekend in Tokyo. We actually spent quite an upsetting amount of money, an alarmingly large number (followed by "hundred") that you would normally associate with a big overseas trip or the buying of several Playstations. Another "no spendy weekendy" was definitely in order to balance things out. Our normal pattern is to announce the NSW, resist for a moment and then collapse noisily into ruin and expensive dinners, but we decided to try a new approach this time. I'm pleased to say that the "literally only have $20" method was a roaring success. I had exactly what I needed to get to and from work and no more, which cut down on discretionary spending and outrageous luxuries like food and water. We did seem to go through a jar of coffee and 2L of milk by staying in over the weekend though, which I will try to explain once I stop grinding my teeth and repeatedly going to the toilet.