Concert and Film

Once again, Felicity and I attended Aikido in the morning, and, as usual, it was most enjoyable with the best part being the second of the lesson. It's a little easier to understand what one is meant to be doing when you have a partner who already knows. This does give you a sense of guilt though since you suppose that they want to be practicing properly. One of the guys does though, at least on me, when he spinds me around at full pelt before throwing me to the ground (in a controlled manner, of course), all the while laughing his head off. I enjoy it though, and I laugh too.

In the afternoon I travelled with Drummond to a concert in Meinohama. It was free, and Ciarán was playing his cello in it, and James was singing in the chorus, both in the second half. The first half was taken up by an all female chorus singing Japanese songs to a piano accompaniment, followed by a mostly all female chorus singing Japanese songs to a piano accompaniment (though it was a different female pianist). I recognised about one of the songs since Fujita-san gave us the music so that we might sing it as part of our Christmas barbershop performances: it was about snow.

The second half was of the first and fourth movements of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Also playing was Isao Fukazawa, whose concert we went to last December when he played along side Daisuke Iwasaki. Isao got Ciarán into the orchestra in the first place by recommending him, even though he'd never heard him play! He is good, though. The lady I was sitting next to said she knew lots of people who were in the concert, including the conductor from the second half. She even said bye before she left.

In the evening I spent an hour or so trying to explain to Nozomi the differences between using "What" and "How" in such sentences as "What a nice car you have!", and "How lovely this flower smells." It's much harder than you think, and I'm not even sure that I explained it properly. Open challenge: try and explain it in a brief comment here. Should be interesting.

Finally tonight, we watched "The Godfather," which is a very good film, especially when you consider when it was made and released. Sunday night is, of course, film night.