The Even Greater Tokyo Region

Fighting to Prove I am not Wasting My Time.

I'm always worried that I'm giving people the impression that instead of studying and improving my education, I am simply wasting my time with pointless activities. This is not true; last weekend I went to World Pillow Fight Day.

Yes, there is an official World Pillow Fight Day. You know it has to be official because they have a website.
http://www.pillowfightday.com/

It's held in about 60 of the great cities of the world like Amsterdam, New York, and Reykjavik.

In Amsterdam, it was held in the Dam, the symbolic centre of the city. It was scheduled to start at 5pm. I arrived early, and there were several people sitting around, on pillows, but not enough for an-out pillow war. But it became busier and busier, until the horn sounded, and the Dam exploded in a puff of feathers, rhythmic pillow-to-head-hits and screams. It was pretty sensational.(This guy's flickr account has more interesting photos of the event. Click on the photo to see them)

I joined in for a while, but I could not keep up. I'm sure that many of these people were on pillow-fighting performance enhancing drugs. I mean, it is Amsterdam. (The Association needs to crack down on this problem).
I couldn't help but think, this might be a little bit tasteless, and really quite awesome.

I did have a braveheart moment where I fended off several people as I made my way deep into the centre of the action. However, I got hit a few times too many, I swallowed a few too many feathers, and spent the rest of the time looking on like this:

I thought the fight would last 5, 10 minutes, tops. But no, it kept on going. half an hour later, the fight had condensed down, but was still fierce. I take this as further evidence of performance enhancing substances. It lasted for a full hour. At one point while I was watching, a girl came and talked to me. That was sweet, except she was from a cancer charity. ("for just 5 Euro a month, you can help toward the cause. You can even choose if you want the money to help men or women! Cancer isn't sexist, but that doesn't mean you can't be!")

Great, it's all fun and games until someone asks you for money. I admitted guilt, and immediately the fun was over.

But I was glad to be a part of this historic event, and not wasting my time doing meaningless things.

(Note: I may have inadvertantly insulted people from the fine city of Reykjavik. This was not my intention, and I want to reassure my many loyal Reykjavikian readers that I am aware that it is a fine city with "lots" of culture and would be a great place to raise your kids... if they have moustaches... and speak... Russian?)