Kokawa Festival

This past Saturday, I met up with some other ALTs and we went to a festival. The festival was held in Kokawa. Kokawa is 4 train stops away from my town. First let me tell you that the transportation here in Japan is amazing. I live 3 minutes from the train station, so it's very handy for me to catch a train. The trains are on time and run very well. They are also air conditioned and the fare is cheap. It beats driving a car. Anyway, I met up with Sarah, Sean, Noel, and Sean B. I'm not really sure what the purpose of the festival was, but it was incredibly fun. It appears that different neighborhoods or organizations made floats with lanterns on it. I'm sure that the kanji on the lanterns probably describes something, however I can't read kanji yet. The lanterns were lit so the float glowed. People would ride up on top of the floats and wave to all of the spectators. Every so often one float would come flying up the street and then stop for viewing. In order to move the float, many volunteers would grab hold of one of the two bars in the front or back of the float and push and pull the float to the new location. It looked like a lot of hard work. Then another goups float would move to a new location. This system of moving the floats up and down the street continued all evening. There was also all sorts of fabulous festival food. It was oishi. There were many people dressed up in beautiful yukattas (summer kimonos). One funny event involved a man grabbing all of us foreigners and asking us to play the drums. It was somewhat embarrassing b/c a really good group of drummers had just performed and we didn't really know what to do. I just followed Sean's lead. We did receive a very nice courtesy applause when we finished. It was a very exciting evening. Click here and here to see more photos of the festival.