Kimono Festival

Today was the Kimono Festival in Miyazu, right on the Amanohashidate. I took a few pictures so I'll put them up in a later post. It was a lot of fun!

First Junko (from the English Conversation Group - pronounced June-ko) picked us up. She's super sweet. She took us to her friend's house where a bunch of people were putting on kimono. This was a really huge house....the daughter of the house had been Kimono Princess last year, and like...I think they collected them or ran a kimono shop or something, because they had a ton of kimonos. The mother was about the same general size as me, so I wore a pretty black kimono with white butterflies on it, and a pretty dusky purple obi (the wide belt) with a silver and violet tie on it. They put up my hair with these cute pink flower pins and I wore Japanese toe socks. I'm sure I was cuter than I felt.

Japanese sandals are MURDER OH GOD. As I type this post, my feet are crying. Literally crying. I remember the first time I came to Japan I got a cute pair of shoes for my aunt, and now I'm realizing what an awful present that must have been because oh god.

Anyway. There were lots of really cute kimonos today. There was a girl with cute poofy pigtails in an orange and green kimono who I wanted to take a picture of, but she vanished before I could. Later, she won some contest. So I guess a lot of people shared my taste. We walked around a lot, and had lunch at this restaurant all together. (We met up with Yuuko and Taichi and Ken, three of our twentysomething Japanese friends who are all very good at English, at the festival, along with Maryanne, one of the other JETs in the area.) I took pictures of the lunch because it was epic Japanese.

Then when we got out, we were considering what to do next when Alex ('cause I didn't see) noticed a tour guide sneak up alongside us and a photographer sneak up along the other side of us, snap a quick picture of our group (mid-conversation) with the tour guide beside us, and the two of them slunk off. So we'll probably end up in some tour brochure. If I find it I'll scan it for laughs, but...seriously!?

Actually a lot of people were taking pictures of us. It was fun. "Foreigners in Kimono" will be the theme of next month's VOGUE-U.

We rode on a boat...

We got our pictures taken near the rotating bridge...

We drank complimentary green tea and ate mochi (pounded rice cakes - sticky and chewy - with sweet red bean paste on top. It's supposed to make you wise. Oo) and talked with some other JETs we met there.

Uhmmmm....

Oh! There were lotteries and stuff. Last year Holly (the JET who was here before me) won the huge TV we have now. I won a cute little wrap made of local silk for my lunchbox.

Alex won a big honkin' fish.

It was pretty epic. We ended up giving the fish away to Junko, but he carried it all around the festival with him. What a guy!

There was a lottery at the end, too, and I won a soy sauce set, and Alex won some soba noodles, so that'll be fun.

They made me and Alex enter the "couples" kimono contest. I'm glad we didn't win.

I'm tired.