Music and puzzles

Friday

The Gathering officially opened to day. Despite another short night I was up and ready for the opening in time. There were some new arrivals who had flown in early in the morning and also discovered the 3pm check in.

After the welcome from the chairman of Japanese Mensa and the conference organise and general notices, the first session was on the traditional music of Japan. This included live music from a young lady who played strings instruments and a guy who played the flute.

In addition, there were performances via video of 2 earlier styles. The first of these is used only in special ceremonies and was quite strange to western ears. The second was part of Noh plays. It started with 2 percussion players and a flautits and then a group of males singers were chanting. One of the drummers reminded me so much of those windup monkey drummers that I had to stop myself laughing.

I went for lunch with Christine and a Dutch guy, Hennie. Our hotel is just across the canal from en entertainment area, so lots of restaurants etc are with in a short walk. This was a much better choice than Thursday and I had a tasty Crab gratin.

The afternoon events were held in 2 sessions. One had presentations on Food and culture then one analysing Japanese Idol.

I was in the game and puzzle room. The first puzzle had many cards (7x7 grid in fact) with each card having the alphabet in a mix of upper and lower case. We struggle for an hour or so to decode it with no success. The answer was of course quite simple an elegant of not obvious, in hindsight.

If you set the capitals to on and the lower of off and then recorded the positions of the A, then B etc each letter defined a pixel image of another letter an they spelt out a phrase.

The puzzles were great fun. There were around 100 of them of varying types and difficulty, although all were physical objects. These included the sort where you had to fit shapes into a board, make 3 D objects from blocks etc, I was quite goof at a lot of the 2D stuff and got a lot of them out, some quite quickly, while others were just too hard.

The Japanese Food experience was the evenings event and there were 60 of us in low tables of 5. Shoes were removed at the entry and we were sitting on cushions complaining about how we couldn't do this at our age any more.

I lost count of how many courses we had but we started with some raw fish and prawns, a small plaater with some jelly squares and a snail or mollusc and a small cooker fired by a candle with fish, prawn and mushroom. This last was cooked by the time the first 2 dishes had been eaten, although my Chinese fried Sherman put the raw fish from the other dish in their to cook as well.

Drinks were again included and after a small beer I switched to some peach flavoured cocktail - long live alco-pops.  More food appeared from time to time through out the 3 hour meal. at one stage I had an interestingly flavoured cold drink with a soy taste and shallots, which I though might be a sort of soup. later some noodles appeared and people started poring this sauce on to them.

There was also Karaoke, but in such a large room it was quite difficult to hear yourself to know whether you were in tune. (translation - probably not)

It seems quite a few went on to a different Karaoke bar afterwards but I finished up back at the hotel in the suite introducing some more members to the game.