Sheep Festival

Last Sunday, Ayako and I drove up north of Hamamatsu to watch a festival celebrating sheep. Actually, the reason we found out about the festival was that we knew that they serve handmade soba (buckwheat noodles) and we wanted to try them again. The only problem is that you can only get them during the fall when the leaves are turning and everyone flocks to the area or when a festival is on. Therefore, the first thing we did at the festival was enjoy some handmade soba and some tempura made from mountain plants (on the table in front of Ayako):
After lunch, we looked around at some of the stalls selling crafts and tried some other drinks and snacks that were for sale. Next was the first main event, which was sheep shearing:
It was definitely slower than the sheep shearing competitions that I saw back home at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair:
The second main event was a race between the 7 lambs that had been born in the past two months. They each had a different colour ribbon on them and you could bet on the winning sheep with your festival entry ticket:
I chose the lamb with the green ribbon since he was the youngest but wasn't the smallest so I guessed he was good at running for his dinner. And so the race began:

As you can hear, I was excited that my lamb was the winner. Everyone who voted for the green lamb received a small lamb doll made out of wool. Very exciting.

UPDATE: We found out that while we were watching the lamb race, we were being filmed for TV. A number of our neighbours saw us on TV that night and were excited to tell us about it when we saw them.