Matsuri

Matsuri means "Festival".

Every town has a summer festival of some sort or another, it seems, and MyTown is no exception. The Summer festival is where the town goes all-out to do very traditional Japanese things. There are traditional foods, traditional songs, and traditional clothes (Called "Yukata", which are like very light Kimono). It's very cool.

Last week, Maia and I went on over to MyTown's Natsu Matsuri.

We dressed for the occasion:
You may notice my shoes, called "Geta". They are traditional and designed solely to break ankles... or allow walking in flooded rice fields... one or the other...

The Festival itself took place in the center of my town. They closed off all major roads into my town for the festival itself which made travel through the area very interesting... however, it allowed for us to wander the streets, along with 10,000 other people that came from miles around...

The streets were lined with vendors of every kind,

and the food was very... um... interesting. Actually, there were all kinds of things to eat... but the squid on a stick I stayed away from...

There were traditional Japanese interperative dance troupes, stationed in floats, which performed all kinds of interesting dances...

And of course, no festival is complete without a Taiko drum group:

This was the heart of Japan. As I walked in the streets (I ran into many of my students, who gave me the "Woah, he really has a life outside of school?" look, were still nonetheless happy to see me wandering the streets of MyTown in Yukata), I realized that this really was Japanese culture. Something you really can only get a taste of in America. Even at the best of times, you can only see a fraction of what I saw only about 10 meters from my apartment.

---Me.