Last minute posts...

This post is (hopefully) not going to be as long as they normally are because it's almost 10 o'clock and I don't feel like sleeping in tomorrow and missing school. Actually, I wouldn't mind that, but AFS would, so I'll go anyway.

I say last minute because I wasn't going to update until about half an hour ago when I decided that it's probably best before the next few days.

I'll get right to last weekend. "What?" you're saying, "You already talked about it on Saturday." Yes, yes I did. However, the fun didn't end there. The day after, on Sunday, my family took me downtown to Kumamoto City to watch a local festival. The name of it escapes me, which I feel really bad about because it was actually really fun. My host father said it was Dentetsu... But when I searched that on google nothing came up so... Either we had another miscommunication or this festival is unpopular enough to not make it onto google. And judging by the amount of people that were there, it was NOT unpopular. 

We took the train (電車 look at me and my kanji... ain't it beautiful?) downtown which only took about 25 minutes and then walked for about 7 until we came to the busiest street in the area. After walking past what was probably about 50 small stands altogether (it looked just like what you would imagine a Japanese festival to look like; very traditional looking. If you don't know what I mean, go watch some anime), we came to.... wait for it.....





A SHRINE. Holy crap I was so excited when I saw what we were doing.

Before you walk into the actual shrine you have to rinse off your hands; cleanliness is important when you're praying. There's a fountain thing-y with these cups on sticks (I'm positive that there's a word for them, but my gai-jin phrasing will have to do) that you dip into the water and pour over your hands.

 That's the back of my host sister's head.

 So here's the shrine. SO. FREAKING. COOL. I felt very Japanese, as lame as that sounds. That's my dad, other sister, and brother. I hope you're enjoying the backs of everyone's heads, cause that's pretty much all I've got.

 This is where you take your money and throw it. Woah that sounds really dumb. It's kind of like the fountains when you were little and you would ask your parents for a penny to throw in... No one else? Really? It doesn't have to be much; I threw in 1 yen. It's a box with these slats in the top that the money falls through. You throw the money in, put your hands together in front of you and 'pray'. And I say 'pray' because I didn't really do anything, I just did it for the effect. I'm not even sure if I was supposed to be praying, but I felt totally legit either way.

 This:

Is basically what happened during the whole parade that we watched. And that was not meant in a bad way. It's basically 60+ different groups of people that dress up in traditional clothes and waves fans in the air, beat drums, and scream at the crowd to get everyone excited. Now that I say it like that, it sounds like a high school pep rally. But BETTER.

 With every group comes the fan wavers (for lack of a better word), a horse (which I'll get to in a sec), someone carrying a massive flag, and this guy. ^^ A man with a microphone. Who yells. Now, I couldn't understand a word any of them were saying but judging by the energy that they were creating, my guess is that they're there to excite everyone and really get them all into the festival. Oddly enough, it works. Normally I can't stand anyone yelling at me but these guys were strangely engaging.

 Here's the horse I was talking about. Only there were 60+ different ones and I didn't take a picture of each one. I know how much you all wanted to see them ALL.... I still don't really understand the point of the horse. I got the impression that it wasn't tame because each one had people on either side of it holding it as they lead it through the street. Kind of terrifying at times, especially when it would all of a sudden jerk towards me.

 More people; as you can see, every group had a different color.

 And this was me taking a creeper shot of a random person's shoes because I was thinking of this blog and how I wanted to show what their shoes looked like. They really really really look like socks to me. And some of them made people's feet look very Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-y which was greatly amusing to me.

I'm not usually one to like crazy loud gatherings of people (and believe me, this was one of the loudest things I've ever heard in my life), but this was so different that I SO enjoyed myself. Everyone in the parade was smiling and laughing the whole time. It was so great to see everyone enjoying themselves so much. 

End mushiness. 

All-around a great day. Unfortunately, we didn't stay at the festival very long; not too sure why, but we were only there for about 2 hours. Sad Ellie. One of these weekends I'll go back downtown and come back with a load of awesome pictures.

Not much else to report; school pretty much consumes my week so I don't have much time to do anything worth mentioning. This weekend I'm doing plenty, however, so whoever out there is reading this: I'll have plenty to talk about next week. ;)

-Ellie