Today saw the finals of the Japanese Speech Contest 2007 held at the Japanese Association, Singapore.

Guess who attended this event?

Since I am so immensely lazy, I’ll just post a photo that contains the participants sorted by category, their titles, and the position they obtained. * indicates special mention prize.

(Click for larger version)

One year has passed, yet I feel that not enough has improved. Needless to say, my comprehension of most of the speeches left much to be desired. This is made progressively harder as the speakers get lousier—I am amazed that Mr. Machinegun on burst-fire mode got 3rd place. Incidentally, there is a graded listening comprehension test tomorrow and I’m going to fail it.

Once again, the highlight of the day was the lunch break, the savoury Japanese food waiting to be devoured. Well, good food is one of the benefits of having a fairly large budget. And the origami session this year was definitely more engaging than the tea ceremony tutorial they had last year. We made balls.

Though mine definitely looks more cube-ish than ball-ish.

And if you haven’t realised it, I was just kidding about the picture. The tag was real though.