Since this past weekend wasn't terribly exciting, I'll offer a past-due recap of my weekend from several weeks ago, which was quite busy.
That Friday night I attended the charter membership meeting at
HacDC, a new "hacker space" in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC. I haven't been able to visit the space very often with my busy schedule and distance from it, but it's an exciting effort nonetheless. At last night's organizational meeting, a bunch of new members who weren't present (including me) were approved, which had the weird effect of suddenly meaning that a quorum was no longer present, and so the meeting adjourned. :) I'm just amused by that.
On Saturday morning I attended a
taiko workshop held by
Nen Daiko. Being totally new not just to taiko but to drums in general, I had some trouble understanding what forces to apply to the
drumsticks at what point in striking the drum.
Nen Daiko is holding a series of beginner taiko classes on Sunday afternoons in June, but even if I had an accommodating schedule, Fairfax Station is awfully far for me to drive on a regular basis. It's too bad, because they seem like really friendly, fun people, and of course taiko's a blast.
Next was tea ceremony class, just a normal lesson, although it was the last time I got to see one of my classmates before he began his year off to care for his soon-to-be-newborn baby. As a congratulatory gift I made him
a chenille-backed baby blanket with a temple festival motif. And I just learned that the baby was born yesterday evening!
From there I joined
a group of Japanese-language learners at a noraebang (a predominantly Korean
karaoke box) for an evening of singing. The idea is fun, but I recognized very few of the songs in their catalog, which included some Japanese and English-language songs along with many Korean songs. The other people I was with found Japanese songs they knew, whether from
anime or from a familiarity with
J-pop, I don't know. They also introduced me to the
Numa Numa song, bringing to four the number of languages sung in that night. If I go again, I'd want to find a Japanese song that I know will be in the catalog and study it beforehand.
On Sunday I visited a home in Chevy Chase where a Kyoto-based
kimono retailer, Sōjuan (双樹庵), had set up a showing. Nearly all of my kimono are secondhand, and even when I've visited Japan I've felt unsure about being able to assess the condition (for used ones), seasonality, and appropriateness for tea ceremony of a given kimono. But when I showed up to this house, I was happy to see a senior fellow tea ceremony student who's a
professional kimono dresser open the door. She was like a fairy godmother for this situation! I tried on a number of gorgeous kimono and eventually decided on two: a relatively cheap, washable
komon with a contemporary
sakura motif; and the
pièce de résistance, a light-green silk
homongi with an ivy motif. Since their silk kimono were in karinui (仮縫い) form (just basted together), I'll be receiving that second kimono after they tailor it, sometime next month.
Having rung up possibly the highest single charge on my credit card to date, I took the metro over to
Artomatic, on the other side of the city, for my second visit this season. There's so much interesting art there that I wouldn't know where to begin writing about it. I could spend hours and hours wandering around there, and I did, but eventually I grew hungry, and since none of the venue's food vendors showed any signs of being open, I wandered around the neighborhood. That's how I learned just how deserted the
NoMa neighborhood is on Sundays. It's a ghost town. The few eateries I passed were all closed. So I kept walking, eventually wandering all the way to
Chinatown and dining at
Zengo before heading home.
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