So the japanese holiday of Obon just ended. This holiday is when the japanese will go back to their parents homes, visit the graves of the ancestors and pay homage. It is also a time of many festivals and festivities.
Saturday was a festival in a town near to me, Mihara. This festival is famous for the mihara dance. Thousands of people come to this sleepy little town to dance (drunk) in the streets. Check out the pictures here.
Sunday was a fireworks festival in Miyajima. This is where I played samurai in a parade.. very beautiful island. The fireworks were amazing.. they had the barges in the bay and launched them from there. The difference in this show and the others I have seen is that they set off some of the fireworks FROM the barge. By this I mean they didn’t launch them a 1000 feet in the sky, but more like 10 feet. In addition to this they also did the traditional fireworks. The show lasted an hour and there were somewhere around 200k people watching the show. We queued in line for about 1.5 hours to get back on the ferry and get to the train, where we queued for about another 45 minutes before we finally headed home.
Monday I was invited to a friends home. This in itself is very rare. I do know if it is because I had invited him over to my apartment a few times and cooked for him or if he just wanted to have a token english friend over to show his family. Either way it was a good time. His house is out in the country and his father and grandfather are farmers. Alot of his relatives were there, but for the most part they left us alone.
The food was great. I experienced the somen nagashi. This is food custom where they take a long bamboo shoot and cut it in half long ways, they then set it at an incline and run water down it. People line up along it and someone will then start dumping somen noodles into it. The water pushes the noodles down the chute and the people grab the noodles out and eat them. Mixed with beer, quite enjoyable. Along with the noodles they catered to my gaijin needs with some chicken and sushi.
All in all these past few days have been fun. I have come to the realization that when japanese women wear yukatta, it makes most of them extremely beautiful. It is just the opposite for most foreign women though. Probably because the yukatta shows the subtle form of the body as a whole and hides the fact that the wearer has no breasts or backside. This is probably why geisha are considered so beautiful and attractive… or I just like hot soup.
For example..
Check out beautifully she is eating that frankfurter.. Sorry about the framing in the picture, but I was trying to be discreet about taking the picture. We couldn’t decide if she was doing this on purpose or if it was just natural.