The music at Amu Plaza for their Christmas Market this year has been pretty disappointing so far. But, I've also been really busy with work for the last couple weeks and haven't been able to get out of the apartment much Mon.-Fri., anyway. I hung around Central Park for the event there on Saturday, then had one class at the English school at 6 PM. That finished a bit early, so I walked the mile up to Amu Plaza in time to catch the 7:30 PM singer, Anna Toribuchi. She started out with Mariah Carey's "All I want for Christmas is you," which is of course copyrighted and therefor not worth uploading to youtube. I still had a lot of work to finish, so I returned to the apartment for the night.
Nakashima Yoimai Fair
I did get done the part I needed to get done, and on Sunday I hit Tenmonkan at 3:30 PM to check out Shochu Street, and the other stuff related to what had been going on in Central Park Saturday.
That included products from Nakashima (fish, bakery goods and vegetables) under the umbrella term "Nakashima Yoimai Fair" ("yoimai" is a local slang meaning something like "happy," I guess). I didn't buy any of the products advertised, just looked around.
Shochu Street was much smaller this time, with just two tables offering "all you can drink" shochu for 500 yen ($4.50 USD) and shochu cocktails for 100 yen each, but they only had 3 different shochu brands to pick from. I didn't feel like spending the entire evening drunk, so I just got two of the cocktails. These consisted of the brand of shochu of your choice, a fruit liquor (melon, lemon or cassis), club soda and a garnish. One drink had the melon liquor and the other was cream de cassis. Both were good, and in glasses that matched the price. It was a decent deal.
(People with shopping receipts waiting to try the lottery for extra prizes.)
Amu Plaza
Then I went up to Amu Plaza for the Yoichi Tajima Group set. I've seen them before, and they do ok jazz. I wasn't planning on recording them at first, then I figured I could at least shoot one song for my archives. Instead, I ended up recording two of the songs, editing them together and uploading them to youtube (see below). There was a lot of background noise with all the people talking, which the camera picked up better than it did the louder music...
Oh yeah, the weather. Friday was nice, Saturday morning it rained. By 4 PM when I got outside, the rain had stopped but the sky was still cloudy. Sunday morning, the rain poured down hard, tapered off around 2 PM, and ended by 3. At 4, the sky was an absolutely clear blue. At 5 PM, the clouds were back and it was raining again. I had stuff I still needed to get done in the apartment before I received the next batch of work on Monday, so I returned home and concentrated on that.
One thing I realized, though is that the Christmas Market schedule only covers from Dec. 1st to the 10th, meaning that they'd have to provide a new schedule soon. I went to the Amu Plaza website, and they finally had the stage show listings available for the month. There's really nothing I have any interest in until the 24th, when Bon DX will be playing on Saturday at 3:30 and 4:30 PM. I have two lessons that day and I don't know what time they'll be. If I have the option, I do want to watch both Bon sets. We'll see.
Direct youtube link
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