Friday, May 6, 2016

Summer is coming

Golden week just passed! It was three awesome days off in the middle of the week, Tuesday to Thursday. Golden week is three consecutive national holidays: Constitution Memorial day, Green day, and Boys'/Children's day.

Each color of fish represents a specific family member- ours is just Kris (in black) and me (in red).
 
For Tuesday Kris and I mostly relaxed, but we also went and picked up this awesome indoor yaki-niku grill. It was less than $80 and totally worth it as we'll save that much by eating yakiniku at home very quickly. We've already used it twice and we're super satisfied with the tasty results.

Grilled food is the best food.

Wednesday we went to Ikea in nearby Tachikawa to spend time with some friends and eat some swedish meatballs. It was a nice relaxing day that included a cool view of Mt. Fuji that is horribly represented by this photo:

Mt. Fuji is the snowy mountain top in the middle, very very very far away... like from San Francisco to Morgan Hill.

Finally, on Thursday we went to our first matsuri (festival) of the year. We went to Fuchu, about 40 minutes away, and hit up the Kurayami Matsuri, or Darkness Festival. It was the last day of the festival so there was a TON of people, but there was also a TON of amazing food and some cool things to see! As we spent most of the time filming video I dont have many good photos from my phone, but here are a couple.

Chocolate Stick Waffle!!! Why don't all festivals in the world have this???

The event was in a huge shaded park with tons of trees.

Tons of people, beautiful banners.

Power cords ran like vines around this place.

The walkway to the shrine.

Chocolate bananas were adorable and plentiful.

Cotton candy with popular characters- can you name them all?

A rotating shooting range for pellet guns- win a prize if you knock one down!

One of the many food stand alleys.

Delicious grilled meats made right in the stand.

We found a churro stand! It had cinnamon, chocolate, strawberry and sugar flavors.

The giant drums came down the parade route, pulled by about 40 people.

These people led the drum team with lanterns.

Candied strawberries- hard candy shell with sugar, warm ripe strawberries inside. Outstanding.

So look forward to a video about this festival soon. We have another festival to look forward to in another week too. Today, Friday, I had work again, but luckily only two classes so I relaxed and studied Japanese the rest of the day. Since today is our anniversary Kris and I enjoyed some amazing yakiniku and delicious ice cream dessert. It was a pretty low-key event but we had one of those "WHOA, we're in Japan" moments when we realized we were eating yakiniku in our livingroom in Japan for our anniversary. So much can change in a year.

As its getting warmer and summer is creeping up we're simultaneously excited about festivals and cicadas and dreading the killer humidity. Look forward to the festival video soon.

K+K

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