Fun With Flowers

It was the day for traditional Japanese flower arrangement! I can't say I was actually looking forward to it, but we didn't have much of a choice in the matter.

After class, we all headed up to one of IBU's many art rooms. 

There were some art projects on display in the hallway.
I was getting real Hidamari Sketch vibes.

In the classroom, all of the stuff we needed was already laid out for us.

Shears, check.

Weights, check.

Kilo, check.

Flowers, check.

The teacher, who seemed none-too-pleased to be disgracing the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement by showing it to a bunch of gaijin, got us started with a PowerPoint.

And thus we began pruning sticks and flowers and propping them up in a tray filled with water.

I apologize for not saying more, but there really isn't much to say about it at all.

Above is a diagram of how we were supposed to create our arrangement. Because, apparently, art needs a template.

A few of us were decorating our bodies with leaves and flowers, much to the annoyance of our disgruntled art teacher of the day.

When my arrangement was sort-of starting to come together, I got up and looked at how other people were doing.

...And occasionally returned to add more to mine.

Eventually the teacher came around and completely re-adjusted mine to her own liking, which left me wondering why we were even doing this in the first place.

Ayaka was having lots of fun, too.

It kinda looks like she's growing out of it. Ha. Ha.

The view from the window.

At last, things were getting wrapped up, and it was time to leave.

I took a couple more pictures of the art room.

They had plenty of newspaper, ready to be abused for art.

Return

After we finished, somebody made the terrible decision that we carry these heavy, cumbersome trays of water all the way back down to I-Talk.

Mine, much like everybody else's, was pretty mangled after wrestling it through doorways and into an elevator. I fixed it to some degree, but it wasn't really stable.

All I could really think after the fact was, "whew, glad that's over."

-----

When we got back to the dorm that night, Jackson made some fried rice with octopus. This marked the first time I had ever tried octopus, for sure. It was chewy, but very delicious!