Last weekend saw the arrival of one of the most anticipated events in the Fukui JET calendar - the Krazy Car Rally. Strictly speaking it's not a rally at all: it's more akin to a mobile fancy dress party crossed with an Anneka Rice-style treasure hunt. I'll try to explain.
At about 9am on Saturday we arrived in Tsuruga and received a disposable camera with a list of objectives, each worth varying amounts of points. We had to use the camera to take photos of our teammates in various uncompromising situations, such as acting out the kanji for mori (forest) in a mori (forest)[10points], improvising phat dance moves in front of a singing Buddha statue [10 points] and crawling between the hairy legs of a giant caveman statue [10 points]. Every photo had to contain an Anpanman doll, and a bonus 5 points were added for every uniformed schoolkid that could be persuaded (bullied?) into appearing in the picture. Another 10 bonus points were up for grabs if your team turned up in costume - hence the pirate outfits.
My team, Kaizoku-jin (pirate people), was an Anglo-American consortium consisting of myself, Sam, Caitlin and Brandon, and I'm proud to say that we finished first. Well, we got to the end first anyway, we actually came 9th overall (out of 14), but I feel we had the moral victory. Considering how tired we all were after nearly seven hours of driving around southern Fukui doing ridiculous things, I feel we at least deserved a medal. However, in the end, we were satisfied with the knowledge that in the face of adversity (ie suspicious policeman asking us what the hell we were up to taking photos of schoolchildren) we had upheld the good name of assistant English teaching pirates in this fair country.
Massive thanks goes out to all the JETs in Southern Fukui who organised the whole thing. You can count on us to be back next year with an unshakeable air of determination and even sillier costumes.
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