国士舘大学新体操部

■Festival Del Sole!!: Day One

Our expedition to Italy has just started!

These are the members of the expedition.

We left Haneda Airport at 23:55 on June 30^th and got to Doha, Qatar eleven hours later.

We always take pictures here.

On our previous expedition to Finland, we had to spend the night in Doha unexpectedly due to a mechanical problem, but this time, our flight went smoothly and we arrived in Doha as scheduled. After a two-hour layover there, we had a five-and-a-half hour flight to Venice. We were supposed to get on a bus in Venice, but a little problem happened here: There was no bus waiting for us… We looked everywhere, but no luck. We were stuck. Two hours later, we managed to make contacts and got on a bus.

It was three-and-a-half hours after leaving Venice that we finally arrived at our destination, Riccione, at 19:30! It took 30 hours from my house! It was a long journey, but we finally got to our hotel!

On arriving at the hotel, we had dinner and started for the opening ceremony without taking a rest. While we were walking to the meet-up area, a lot of people clapped and cheered for us. Maybe they remembered the impact of our performance we did last time, and we could feel the weight of their expectation directly.

From 21:00, we started walking through the town to the “Roman Square”, the center of the festival. Many people were already gathered there waiting for the festival to start. When Kazuri Imao appeared on the stage with a Japanese flag as a representative of our delegation, huge applause erupted.

Nervous Kazuri

He got on the microphone and said, “Welcome to Riccione!!” in Japanese. All participating countries were gathered there. The show involving more than 5,000 people from 20 countries has just started!

Countless number of audience!

Onstage, all kinds of performances were being shown to welcome the people gathered there. After 22:00, with the excitement approaching its peak, fireworks brought down the curtain. The opening ceremony was so wonderful that I expected the performances starting from this point forward and for the next five days would be exciting, too.

The long day finished at last. We are going to perform tomorrow. Our first performance is scheduled at around the same time as the final round of the World Cup for Japan! We are going to show the audience performances as exciting as the World Cup matches!