...two funny hats

A lot of people think of Sonos as very serious. We play classical music. We play "the masters." We're a little snooty (::sigh::). I mean, look at a picture from this rehearsal today in Yashiro. Wow, we're serious.

(Ugh, and we're all looking *down*, too. Another pet peeve of mine. Yuck!)


















But we can have fun. Really, we can! Here's Ruben, Cheryl and I. We were waiting for half of our tour group to come back and join us for the return trip to our hotel in Fukushima. (Deep thought for the day: Why is it that the people who set the time never seem to be there on time? Think about that...)



And, here we are playing "the taiko game" in the arcade at the Osaka harbor center. You'd think we'd be good at it, but Ruben sucked pretty hard ("I couldn't hear!" he averred).










Us!










We had our rehearsal today, the first one with the "full group," which includes our Japanese handbell expert, Taiko Otsubo. Dang, she's good. Here she is with me:













We're playing at "Yashiro Learning Omi Core" (gawd knows what *that*'s translated from), which has a 450-seat, intimate theater.


These are our "back tables", which have our extra bells (that's all the bells standing up at the top of the picture), our chimes, and our mallets. This is one of the smaller halls we've played in, so there isn't much room behind the bell tables - it's a tight squeeze when we're transitioning between pieces!






















That evening we trekked over to an Outback Steakhouse (bloomin' onion - *yes*!) and had a nice chat...



...two funny hats
and a plane ticket and a bell case

Type at ya later,

---Jason