Bookstore gigs in Fukuoka are always good, with a great bunch of teachers who all know each other and happily I know quite a few of them now as well. Today was the follow up to the CD5 preview gig I did in March. So to start off was When, When, When which they really got into, then “Where is Mr Monkey?” which they loved! The bit where he gets eaten is so cool, and everyone’s face was a picture! We had a quick go of the assault course game and had everyone shouting out the instructions to one of the teachers who couldn’t see which order I’d put the cards on the board. Then a very quick go through “How do you say … in English?” which was cool.

I figured I’d try and genki things up before the bugs song so did the “What’s your favourite?” song. And what a flop!!! The other week in Tokyo it went down really well ( the non-Japanese teachers were well in to the funky basslines!), and the kids like it, but here it just bombed big time!!! I started off with “What’s your favourite movie?” and for the actions they have to mime their favourite movie, to which they all replied they don’t watch movies! OK, so the next one is sport, but no one played any sports! Cartoon? Nope! And as expected no one was into video games! It seemed like nobody had a pet either, so it wasn’t till “favourite food” that anyone had anything to say! We eventually got to do the song, but they were like “Nah, forget that one, we’ll still buy the CD for the other songs, but that one’s rubbish!” Any other place and I’d have been a bit put back, but they were all cool about it, and I just joined in the laughing! I guess you can’t win ’em all!

Luckily “I can do it” brought them back round and the did a great job for a big happy finish!

Mind you I was shattered by the end of it, I was almost falling asleep! Doing computer work should be banned, after just four days it zapped all my genki power!! Which wasn’t too much fun as I had to do all the product explanations to people who wanted to buy them, and part way through I kept thinking “I’m sure I’ve said this before?” but luckily people were cool with it and Genki English ended up outselling the other publishers so that was OK!

Then, some sleep!