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recent
I went downtown with Tomoe (in town for the weekend) to get her Shinkan-sen ticket back home. It was Guinness Beer day in Japan, and people were out in droves to celebrate. It only took a while to notice that everyone in the parade was an Irish Catholic, so I realized that it was actually St. Patrick's day (or "green day" as Guinness markets it in Japan). It was a hellish scene of overcrowded streets and made me fear for my life after the thing in Chicago a while back.
One pleasant surprise was to see that Japanese schools are more progressive than I thought. I saw a girl's high-school band promoting Guinness beer. Then again, maybe I have a conservative view of progressiveness, since I can't imagine that my high school would ever have allowed our band to play for the group with the big Guinness beer balloon.
As much as I was pleased to see that, I was a little disappointed that there was only one group in the parade playing Irish music, and it was so quite that I almost missed it because I was fussing with my camera. It's hard to make a group of three fiddles loud enough to be heard of the Michigan fight song by some other Irish-Catholic marching band.
I mentioned fussing with my camera. As cheap as I am, I am really hoping my camera is broken. The batteries run out after about 30 seconds now. It's probably just because I need new rechargeable batteries, but this did happen once before when the camera was still under warrantee so... If the camera is broken, it gives me a real reason to upgrade. I have been thinking about it, because I take a lot of pictures, and most of them I hate because the quality is not so great. My camera is great for taking pictures of people within 10 feet away, and really great at getting close-ups of plants, bugs, birds, etc... but it just doesn't have the capacity to take nice scenery shots. It wasn't a big deal in the past, because I always felt that if I wanted to remember a certain place I visit, it was much easier to buy a post card. The reason I wanted a camera was to capture personal events. Now however, I find myself wanting to get good shots of the exact moment, for painting later, and also just to have a nice scenery shot. Sure I have to work on my own photography skills most of all, but I have found that I stopped trying to take pictures I wanted to because I knew the quality would leave something to desire anyway.
Anyway, I have been looking around at cameras again, but really can't make myself spend 50,000 yen for a camera if the one I have (and cost 40,000 when I bought it three-and-a-half years) ago still works.
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