And. And. And.

First performance with 和 da Affair was the next day, Sunday, at the Minakuchi International Festa. I have been rehearsing with them for only a handful of practices, but it is great to create music again, and I hope to keep singing with them for the rest of my time here. They do mostly local events, and do cover songs (mostly? exclusively? I don't know really). We sang some kiddie Christmas carols in Japanese and English (apparently I looked frightened at the beginning... my Japanese is the worst in the group, by a long shot--but practice is also the only real chance I have to be around so much spoken Japanese, too!!! Grad school applications have successfully chewed up my study time--byebye kanji skills, it was nice knowing you, albeit briefly. My vocabulary skills are not growing much, due to the all-English environs at school, now, but I am amassing a rather unusable vocabulary of child-words-- I know three different words for poop now. [And don't forget vomit. And stomach flu.] Lucky ME!) We also did some pop covers, including one with sign language. My big surprise came as they pulled out a song everyone knew, but I had never sung before the sound check, but sang all the verses to for our encore. (Granted, "Can't take my eyes off of you," isn't totally unfamiliar, but whoa!)

It was wicked. I have a t-shirt to match the rest of the band. It is soft and eighteen sizes too big. It has the kanji for hibiki on the back-- 響 ^_^v　Love that kanji. No reason. Coca Cola.