Practice was pretty hectic this morning. I kept on explaining certain instructions and things like that, but since everything was so rushed it was hard for everyone on the team to understand what was going on. Oh well it turned out pretty good. I just pray that everyone would respond more during worship and stuff. I would write more about it but I don't know how.

Oh yah, I had a singing rehearsal today. Hrmm it was pretty interesting... and long... and boring... and I sounded like a little boy with the lung capacity of a chipmunk the size of a tennis ball. Oh well, I'll aim to sound much better next week.

At around 7:30 we took BB to HFAN. Man what a great group of guys and girls.

Glam* slept over Thursday night and Hibbt* dropped by for a few hours. We watched Princess Mononoke; what a awsome movie. Throughout the movie, Hibbt was going "Oh my gosh" whenever there was some disturbing scene. Anyways, we ate brownies and stuff so it was pretty fun. Friday night I saw Pirates of the Carribbean with my friend from singing (her names Allie ya'll) and her friends. At around 9:00 I went outside to wait for them to pick me up, and in a few minutes Allie's car pulled up my street herra slo-ow. Once they spotted me Allie (I think it was her) was like "There he is!!!" Haha that was kinda funny. We watched it at Capital 16. Oh man, the movie was herra TIGHT & FUN. Woo woo Mr. Depp makes the coolest pirate. The movie is a summer MUST SEE I says.

Today I went to a picnic thing with a bunch of Leland people (Allie and the people I watched the night before were there, plus Kevin and Grace from Orchestra!) For some reason Simon didn't want to come (Kevin said), too bad :<. Oh yeah, orchestra buds, Ihui's little sister was there too. Anyways it was fun.

I bought some more sheet music. Had to be done.

I cut my hair. Had to be done. I feel younger now.

I programed some more music on Reason. TITENESS.

The ENDs.

YO!

I got my front chipped tooth fixed today! Ohh yeeeaaaah. *shows off tooth* Check it man. Oh, it's so beautiful that I can now drive myself to the dentist, music lessons, church, etc. I feel complete! Wait, that type of thing shouldn't make you complete. Ah well.

Ok I should tell you guys what I've been up to for the past week. From Thursday night to Sunday morning River of Life had its yearly conference in it's new church building. Oh my gosh, the place is so huge and nice. It can hold over twice as many people as our old place!!! It's so cool!
So anyways at the conference what impacted me the most was that if we claim to live in Jesus, we must walk as Jesus walked (1 John 2:3-6). That means our lives need to be spirit filled testimonies of whom we believe in. If you want to know more you can IM me and we can talk about it.

What did I do today? With a bunch of RoL I got to go to Monterey with a group from Orlando. BB woke me up in the morning and was like "Do you want to go to Monterey with the Orlando group?" So right away I called little Angela's mom and asked if I could teach on Tuesday instead of today. She said OK!!! Topping that off, Graham's mom called and offered to pick up my orchestra for me; I had planned to do that today!! YES, I was able to go!



Megan and Allan, from Stockton, chillin' at Jamba Juice. Such CUTE kids. Man now I'm not afraid of not knowing anyone if I eventually go to Davis!


Big Brother is holding ice cream Da Jie jie Angela bought for us to share in Monterey. THANKS! It was good!


In Monterey with some of the Orlando Adults.


Angela and Jing being themselves at Eric's house. HAPPY Birthday ERIC! We all spent a long time debating who was the weirdest of the group going to Mongolia. Eventually we took a "blind" vote. hehe.

I spent 3 hours yesterday electric sanding the walls of the small bathroom in my home. What painful, joyus fun! I got to dress like a radio-ninja with my t shirt face mask and my very large headset (pumping a steady wave of Kpop thrue me ears). I used the Leedah drumming trick: putting earplugs in my ears to lower the outside volume of the sander, then pumping up the volume on my headphones so I could still hear the music. By the first hour I was OK, because it hadn't listened to all my Korean stuff for a pretty long time. By hour two, I was begining to feel the burn. Holding up that electric sander in such unfavorable painty-dust-filled-air conditions gets pretty tiring. By hour three I was a hot sweaty mess (in a radio-ninja outfit). Being stuck in that little bathroom, I started to get really hot (the sander creates a lot of heat; that day was especially burning too). Ok by the end of the third hour the ground is coverd with all kinds of paint flakes, dust, sheets, and I'm breathing hard because obviously radio-ninja clothes aren't good enough air filters. I think I'll finish the rest tonight.

Oh what a painfully joyus life I lead!!!

went to the beach today at 1/2 moon bay!! I had so much fun BBQ-ing the never cooking chicken!! Now my denim smells like BBQ... hehe.

Crazy fools!!!

saw charlies angels 2 yesterday with orchestra buds (Ju-T, Ni-Chloe, and Matthias). Good action just lots of nasty stuff (too much booty slapping). Slept over at Hibbts then today he and I went to IKEA. What a crazy store!!!

June 29th, 2003 in Tsukiyono
Yesterday my host family took me to a park for a picnic, and then we went shopping at this huge department store (kind of like Target). The concert that day was probably the best of my life. We got to play all of our encore pieces and the audience wouldn’t stop applauding! The orchestra probably stood up 6 or 7 times. Yair finally pulled me offstage by the arm (cute).
Today Yuko took Gary and I to a high school to watch the kendo team practice for about 20 or so minutes. It was so cool! The kendo teacher also taught English so he could communicate very well. Afterwards we walked to Yuko’s parents’ house where we ate lunch. Yuko’s dad was really funny. He took out this sword thing and pretended to be this warrior guy.
The performance that day was a joint concert with four or so Japanese groups of young musicians. I made lots of friends with the Japanese people, wahoo! This one girl named Megume (Meh-GU-Meh) was my best buddy that day. I think she was 14 or 15. Anyways she was sitting behind me during one of the joint rehearsals (and for the performance as well. So whenever I had a question I would turn around and look at her music. The next time I saw her I gave her a really friendly wave so when it was time for a group picture she gestured for me to sit next to her. I also met a 14 year old guy named Joshoru. He was the percussionist for the junior orchestra. Before I walked out, I gestured to him “ready?” and he copied my gesture! Figures that he’s Zimardi’s homestay brother. After the concert I was looking for Megume for a picture so I asked a bunch of girls from her school where she was so I could take a picture. Then all the girls wentt hysterical and orchestra people thought I was being the mad pimp! HAHA how funny.
After the performance and changing into nice casual clothes, everyone went to this restaurant for a cool party (with lots of food, but I didn’t eat cause I wasn’t hungry). They had drumming and music so it was noisy (but cool). I hung out with Megume and Joshoru the whole time so it was really fun. I took a lot of pictures with people. On the way out I knocked an ashtray on one of the homestay mothers. Dang that sucked.

One of the parks in tsukiyono

July 2nd, Chofu
The orchestra nearly missed the bullet train today. A lot of us had to wait from 20 to 30 minutes for the morning elevators to get our stuff to the bus. We probably made the train within 2-3 minutes of departure. It was really cool because we got a whole section of the train for our group. I got to sit with people like Nicole, Judy, Christina. Judy was pretty funky. Maybe it was the train ride. Anyways, I ate dinner with people like Amy Kuo and Dan Wang (There were also a lot more people). Amy and I were getting kind of uncomfortable because our group was getting really annoying and noisy in the restaurant.
July 2nd,
I went shopping yesterday (the 1st) morning; there was a Totoro store!!! Outside of the store I said “Look, a Totoro. Wait… is this a Totoro store?” When we realized it was a Miyazaki themed store we were so excited!! I bought a lot of Hello Kitty towels and a necklace for Leslie. My towel purchases got a lot of towely jokes, hehe. In every store Vincy was like “Tim! Towels!” For lunch Vincy, Eva, Grace, and I got lunch at from a nearby grocery store.
Later in the day we had a rehearsal, and before our concert Yair told us he had a bad feeling about the nights performance. He said that after our great performance in Tsukiyono, it would be a crime to not play our best. Everyone was so nervous that we had a pretty bad performance. All the solos were pretty screwy, and by the intermission everyone was feeling really depressed and sad. I gave some encouragement during tuning, and later a few people told me that it helped. I’m glad that we all pulled through OK. After the concert Yair was extremely pissed. I went out to find the Japanese friends I made at the exchange the night before. I didn’t see my friends but Yair passed me by without saying anything. I think he was walking off his anger or something. So I went back behind stage and guess who pops though the doors? Yup, my Japanese friends. They gave me flowers and this weird eraser stuff (a white pencil with a brush and the eraser end?!), and I took some pictures with them. They had this pretty girl with them to help translate for them. On the bright side Caitlyn, Amy and I got a newspaper interview with the local newspaper. That was pretty cool. Anyways, when we got to the hotel Yair had a meeting with us. He said that it was the worst performance of his life. Yikes!
July 4th, Anagasaki
Yesterday we performed at the girls catholic school. We had a really good performance, and the girls were all over Scott and Chris! Lucky white guys (just kidding)! The girls were going nuts and screaming after the performance. After only our first piece there were all these gasps and oos in the silence before the applause (cooool!)
Today was the joint performance in Okayama. I met two cool guys; Shogo and Satosh(i). Shogo is 14 but really good at the violin. The girls (Vicki, Lydia, etc) were all over him (he is pretty good looking)! I can’t wait for the exchange party tomorrow!!
Hahahaha Cindy is so funny. *holding a disposable camera *“Tim, do you think this is rip off?” I also got my eyes curled by Christine! It looked really weird.



three cello girls and one violinist (to the right).

Shogo and his friends saying bye

July 7-8th , Anagasaki
Wahoo! The final concert is all over! Gary and I stayed at a homestay last night. Besides eating, we basically just watched TV and played Time Crisis II on the PS2.

Some dude eating as many wasabi sandwiches possible in one minute
So after the concert we went to the hotel for a little party (more food) and then we were free to do whatever we wanted with no curfew!! I went with a bunch of people (like Sarah, Joseph, Cindy, Ihui, Shawn, George, Cheryl, Derrik, etc.) and we took a Ferris wheel that went over the city for a cool view. It was kind of unpleasant for Joseph because he didn’t really like heights. We also did an hour of karaoke in this really ghetto karaoke place. It was dark and dirty and there were screaming drunks on the floor above us. It was still really fun though! After that we went to play a game of bowling. It’s so cool how you get your bowling shoes; there are machines sorted by shoe sizes, and you hit the button on the machine of your size and your bowling shoes pop out. After bowling people slowly began to leave back to the hotel. Everyone was getting pretty sleepy. I got back to the hotel at around 3:30. I showered, brushed my teeth, changed into clothes for the next day, and then took a quick 1 hour nap.

touring on the very last night very late at night