The Seaside Festival

8/3/08

I met up with some new friends and Lumarie to go check out the seaside festival on Saturday evening. I successfully navigated the bus route to the arcade (yay!) and met them at Seattle’s Best Coffee. We left and went out to the harbor to a massive festival, complete with vendors, food, and live music. We wandered about and met several of the students from my school, took pictures with them (many in traditional summer kimonos), and perused the temporary shops. The fireworks started at 8, so by 7pm we had found a really great spot by the water and waited. Anthony and Dino, the other two ALTs with Lumarie and I, were from a neighboring island and took a ferry to come to Sasebo for the weekend. I’ll have to go and see them soon, they were tons of fun. Now is a great opportunity to say the Japanese really know their hanabi (Japanese for “flowers of fire” or fireworks). Most shows I saw in the states, even in big cities like Atlanta, were 15-20 minutes tops. This show lasted over 50 minutes. Every 15 minutes or so we’d clap and say “yaaaay” only to stop and be like… “oh, guess it’s not over.”

We topped off the evening with a drink at the “Standing Bar” where they have the cheapest beer in Sasebo along with equally inexpensive but very delicious gin and tonics. It was awesome and the best gin and tonic I’ve ever had (and I hate gin!). We befriended an older gentleman who, as a pattern is starting to inform me, was much more receptive to us when he found out we were teachers and weren’t gunjin (Navy). He bought us a round and instructed the bartender to serve it to us a few minutes after he left so we wouldn’t feel obligated to buy one in return. We finished the evening with “pe-ri-ku-ra” or basically a photo booth that is super popular in Japan with teenage girls. You take funny pictures with various kinds of backgrounds and pose in ridiculous ways, and then you decorate your pics with all kinds of additional markings. Things like hearts, stars, rainbows, add hats, cartoon animals, sunglasses, and maybe even your name and the date in glitter print. The pictures print off as stickers you can attach to scrap-books or photo albums and you can have the pictures you like best sent to your cell-phone. I know what you’re thinking… don’t say it. I’m not saying it isn’t true, just don’t say it :P

The pictures are fantastic... Have a look!