Samurai, Leprechauns and Sagicho

This last weekend was pretty eventful. Saturday was graduation for the 9th graders at my school. So I suited up and sat through a boring ceremony, but enjoyed saying goodbye to the students and wishing them luck in the future. After that I went to Kyoto where we celebrated St. Patrick's day in Kyoto at a bar called Around (same bar for Halloween) and a $10 ticket gave you one free drink and a donation to "Doctors without Boarders." Unfortunately it also looked like we got "DJs without talent."

Anyway, that night instead of staying awake in Kyoto I headed to Osaka. My friend won a free room at the ANA Crown Prince Hotel so we decided to use it before expiration. Definitely the nicest hotel I ever spent the night in. Must have been 5 stars.

After about 5 hours of sleep I headed to the Osaka port to go see the last day of an art exhibit. I arrived at the museum at about 10:45 and almost all the tickets were sold out. Luckily I got a ticket for admission at 3:30. It was worth it though, this artist, Takehiko Inoue, is definitely my favorite modern Japanese artist. This exhibit is from his current manga (comic) called Vagabond. Vagabond is also about my favorite Japanese historical figure. Miyamoto Musashi. He created the double sword technique and also is legendarily known for never loosing a battle.

After arriving back in Shiga in the evening I went to a festival called Sagicho where basically people make huge parade floats and then light them on fire! I only watched for about an hour though before I had to catch my last train home.