Friday, August 25, 2006

Shinjo Matsuri


These 2 pics are from a festival we just went to this weekend in the city next to us. The city is roughly 50,000 people and about 400,000 come the festival each year. All of the floats were decked out similair to this one but each a little different. Of course the ones I liked most turned out worst in the photos, so here's a devil one. The diference with american floats is that these are all pulled by people power. Several dozen pulling long ropes and a few pushing it. Attached to the back of it are drums people play, also traiditional flutes and guitars are played, each float has its own music, though they all sound similair. The family to the right are our next door neighbors, the Yaguchis. Actually, the parents are in the middle, the girl in black and the boy in blue aren't our neighbors, they are the relatives of our neighbors who just came for the festival. They are way too nice to us. Daily they either invite us over for food or bring us some. We haven't gotten our American packages of food we sent by boat yet, so all we have to give them are Jelly Bellies. They like them but its not really a fair trade. Anyway, they are super nice and have made life here a lot easier already. I'm sure we'll talk about them a lot more in the future so I thought I'd put up a pic of them.

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