Lucky: Walking out the door of your apartment to find that a summer festival has exploded all over town into little bits and pieces of happiness, paper lanterns, golden shrines, and people in cute outfits.

Unlucky: Going to take your first picture, only to find that your camera has run out of batteries in the past week of non-use.

Lucky: Having a cell phone camera as backup.

Unlucky: Looking at your cell phone and realizing you only have about ten free minutes before you have to get your ass to work.

Lucky: Said workday is "stay time," meaning there's nothing to do and you can perch yourself by the window and watch the festival from an awesome vantage point.

Unlucky: The window is made of the most reflective glass ever, and all your pictures will inevitably contain the ghost of the back of a microwave.

Lucky: Wow! Look at all those drunk dudes in cute little shorts bouncing that shrine on their shoulders! And there's a parade when the sun sets! More people dancing in colorful outfits! Young men waving giant flags around! Smiling women pounding on drums! Asian babies!

Unlucky: Someone just signed up for two lessons back-to-back with me? At the height of parade time? Who DOES that?

Lucky: You have been getting paid about seventeen dollars an hour to sit on the windowsill and watch a festival while eating an ice cream cone. Shut up.

If you squint really hard, you can see a bunch of guys hauling a gold "omikoshi" shrine down the street.

Taken from the teachers' room window, with my cell phone. I need more megapixels.

The beginning of the nighttime parade. I was soon ripped out of my childlike wonder by my two private lessons with Hitoshi, a businessman who complained to me about his loneliness, in very broken English, through a mouthful of noisy saliva.

The festival is supposed to be two or three days long, depending on who you ask. Tomorrow I'm going to leave the house with plenty of time before work, armed with my fully-charged legit digital camera, to see if I can find any sights early in the day.