14th Oct 2006

Had my first attempt at flower arranging today, mum would be most impressed (in fact when I told her, she was), was going to go out to the nearby museum of emerging technology because I couldn’t be bothered with doing the whole long travel thing, but on my way down saw posters for Japanese culture experiences in halls…it listed activities you can take part in in halls…1st Saturday of the month = tea ceremony, 2nd Saturday of the month = Japanese flower arranging, 3rd Saturday of the month = Japanese cooking lessons, 4th Saturday of the month = Karate!...they all cost money for the ingredients I think…flower arranging was 1000yen and I think karate is 4000 yen for hire of equipment…but yeah…it was actually about quarter to 2 when I saw this and class starts at 130…so I was late…and I think you had to register too… but I walked over to the room and made a lame attempt at speaking to someone who didn’t understand English…to see if I could join today…after finding someone who could speak English I was signed up and sat down by a bucket of flowers and basically copied what was in front of me. I think there was some deeper meaning to the arrangement but as I missed the instruction part of the lesson and it would have been in Japanese, I just copied the example…

Anyway I was given a big black dish and a heavy metal plate of vicious spikes (which sat in a pool of water in the black dish) to stab flower stems on to. And started to cut various flowers to different lengths and impale them, on what I thought was a rather artistic way, on the flower base of spikey-doom. After about 15mins I was done and the little old Japanese flower arrangement checker (I assume she was the one who showed everyone how to do the first one) come over and sat by my attempt…then rearranged 2 of my flowers so that they lent out at more of an angle…now it was complete. And apparently there was a show next week in the adjoining building (which I was invited to) to show other people how to do Japanese flower arranging, hmmmmmmmmmm…but anyway thought I’d go along because I now means that I can have the weird flower arrangement in my room and keep the base and bowl for a month…