entry nº 60 // 20190908

if you were looking for me in early september, you probably wouldn’t have thought to check in miyakonojō, in miyazaki prefecture, performing at their first ever festa do brasil. went down w/ a crew of fukuoka capoeira/samba friends for a performance. it was super fun. hot as heck because it’s miyazaki and it was outdoors and still basically high summer, though thankfully the plaza space where the performances were held had this big roof/awning over it so the sun only got you from certain angles or from certain times of the day. 

the capoeira performance was fun, although i realized afterwards that my fly had been down the whole time? of course, these days i’m sporting underwear w/ no opening at the fly, which is a topic for another post entirely, but which means that there’s no real risk associated w/ the fly of my jeans being open, but on the other hand it’s not like the viewing public (who may or may not have even been aware of this whole saga unfolding before their eyes in the first place) knows this, as in, knows that they don’t have to worry about witnessing anything unseemly, and so then when it comes down to it it’s like it doesn’t make a difference anyway, the real threat versus the perceived threat, if you don’t know which of the two you’re facing. unless i had gone around afterwards and apologized to everybody and explained that they needn’t have worried, before, because of the kind of underwear i was wearing. 

(but actually, if we want to get real here, the very cause of this whole thing is those newfangled no-fly-opening underwear, which, precisely because of the fact that they don’t have a fly, something i’m not used to, are fucking with my bathroom routines and causing an outbreak of cases of me forgetting or almost forgetting to zip up the fly on my pants. don’t get me wrong: i love the underwear. it’s just a change that takes some getting used to. okay? 

but really that’s neither here nor there. we rolled down there two big cars deep, fourteen of us total. the performances lasted all day, including two (!) samba parades out into the streets around downtown. pretty awesome for a small little town to put something like that on. also, miyakonojō seems to be doing something right, because this whole downtown city hall-library-plaza complex area where the performance was was all very new and modern and beautiful, and i heard from some locals that they have markets and events there every weekend, lots of support from the city, etc. pretty rad considering that everyone around fukuoka who i mentioned that place to had been like, yeesh, nothing to do or see there, classic city disdain in action for you there, which i mean, i get it and all. but yeah. good first impression of that little town. 

we all stayed overnight, us fukuoka people and the other out-of-towners at this, i dunno how you’d call it, kind of lodge? hostel? neither word really fits, but it was basically just one huge tatami room, maybe i dunno twenty five of us total or something, each of us in our little futon on the floor there. very cozy. but of course before that everyone was drinking and partying, and i like socializing and whatever just as much at the next person but i also love going to bed, and there were various occasions where i found myself thinking why don’t you people just go to bed already for crying out loud!? already being somewhat of an outsider due to being the only foreigner there, it makes it just a liiiittle harder to be even more outsider-y and go to bed before everyone else or whatever, you know? but it was fun, and funny, and everyone was pretty cool and i didn’t understand everything they were saying. 

but the BIG detail here, which you the reader will simply not have seen coming in the least, was this place had public baths on the first floor, which we all got in on before heading up to our room upstairs. simply just nothing like it, and this place also had a cold bath too which was top-notch after the hot bath, and which (the cold bath) had this, how do you explain it, trickle of water? stream of water? pouring down from the ceiling into the bath, so you could sit in the middle of the bath and let the stream of water pour down on your head, and i’ll tell ya, if closing your eyes and doing that for a bit doesn’t get you right, then i don’t know what will.