Craft fair

Ayako found a craft fair that was happening at Garden Park on Saturday, so we head down there and first enjoyed a picnic in the park.

 After, we enjoyed wandering around the fair.  It was a beautiful fall day and there were hundreds of sellers from across Japan.

 I think this may have been the best craft fair that I've been to since it was free, there was a great selection of crafts and and there was lots of room to move around since it was outside.

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.

Local festival

Our local matsuri was held over the weekend. We went down to the elementary school to see some of the events. We had a lottery ticket and were hoping to win the top prize of a bicycle:
Unfortunately we didn't win any of the main prizes, so our parting gift was a box of tissues:
Afterwards, we walked up behind the school to the local shrine. We were given some mochi (Japanese rice cake) for coming up to visit the shrine during the festival:

Golden Week Activities - Hamamatsu festival

We were joined by some friends from Toyohashi today and went down to the beach to see the kite festival:

We could see the kites flying well before we got to the area:

Here I am in front of one of the kites:And here are some of the friends that joined us:
Here is Ayako with Yoko:
In the next few photos, you can see some of the groups with their areas' flags and them flying their kites:

In was quite windy and so the kites were getting tangled more often than I've seen before:

In the video below, you can here the bugles that are played and you can see some groups together trying to keep their kites up in the air while trying to untangle them:

After, we headed downtown for the international food festival

Ayako and I didn't stay to watch parade of floats this year since we had free tickets to go see a movie. We saw Alice in Wonderland, which I thought was alright, although I still don't like wearing the 3D glasses. After the movie, we were able to get a close up look at one of the floats (yatai) all lit up at night:

Sake festival

Yet again, at the end of October, we made the short train trip over to the Hana-no-mai sake brewery for its new sake, which they freely pour for six hours. We saw Christine there with some friends that she brought along:
And we brought a few people along with us from Four Seasons and Aichi University including Mike:
Sian with friends Sachiko and Miho:
Eric & Rachel with Ayako:
Me with a friendly obasan: Ayako with Carrie and Sachiko:
Sian was given some oranges and an empty box of chocolates from a stranger:
We enjoyed doing karaoke with a cloth on some chopsticks:
We met up with our sake buddies who we see once a year at this event:
We enjoyed watching some taiko drumming:

One great guy I met was Kenji, who cooks at a restaurant and made lots of the food we ate on that day:
He was very good at getting rounds of sake for us at regular intervals:
He also had a funny T-shirt on. You can see him here giving care to two of the guys who had passed out:
I did one of yearly traditions of taking a photo with someone who had passed out:
And finally, at the end of the event, Ayako spotted our local representative for the national government who was recently voted in, so I can say that I met somebody semi-famous that day:
Again, another fun day at the sake festival

Princess Parade 2009

For the third straight year, Ayako and I visited the Princess Parade (& festival) in our local town. It was a cloudy & cool day but we could still rode our bicycles there. Just by our house, there is a small playground where the cherry tree was in full bloom and so we could get a nice picture of it:
On the way to the festival, there was a pretty peach tree that was also in bloom:
Here's a shot across the river looking at the main festival area with the cherry blossom walking path behind it:
And here are some photos on the walking path with cherry blossoms making a wonderful canopy over the path:


And here's a close-up of some sakura flowers (cherry blossoms):
We had a little picnic while we waited for the parade to come by our area:
And finally the parade came by:
Here's a picture of this year's princess dressed in orange:
I don't think she's as pretty as the princess from two years ago but at least she's much prettier than last year's princess. We had hoped to ride our bicycles around town so we could watch some more of the parade but it started raining and so we headed home early. Oh well, at least we could get to enjoy most of the festival before the rain came.

Setsubun day

On February 3rd, there is a special day in Japan called Setsubun. Actually, it setsubun refers to the start of each season, but the start of spring day has special traditions associated with it. It seems a bit early for the start of spring, but oh well. Below you can see the materials needed to celebrate Setsubun:
At lunch time, we ate eho-aki (lucky direction roll). This is more of a regional tradition from Osaka area but we thought we would try it. Ayako made a large sushi roll with 7 ingredients inside. We then had to face north-east (this year's lucky direction) while eating the sushi roll. We had to eat it all at once without stopping and while remaining silient.
It was a bit difficult and I couldn't enjoy the sushi roll as much as I would have normally. Here's Ayako eating here eho-maki:
We decided afterwards that it was fun to try but we won't be doing it next year.
The next part was at nighttime, when demons might visit your house. We had a box of soybeans that we used for this. I opened the door and threw out two handfulls of soybeans while shouting "Demons out" in Japanese, and then quickly shutting the door so the demons can't get in:
Next, I threw two handfulls of soybeans inside while shouting "Luck in" in Japanese:
As part of the fun, I also put on the demon mask that came with out pack of soybeans:
I had heard my students talking about this tradition last year, so I was glad to have tried doing it this year.