Nagasaki Kunchi Matsuri

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the main reasons Dad and I went to Nagasaki was for the Kunchi Festival. Apparently it's been going on for almost 400 years at Suwa Shrine, the main shrine in town. There were several colourful floats being paraded all over town, including one we saw of a big trading ship.
There were also several "floats" (no idea what they're called), two of which can be seen in the last two pictures, which were each carried by one man at a time. They were quite big, and looked like they'd be very heavy. Someone would be inside carrying it for about 50 metres, and then would stop and do a little dance, spinning around with it. The crowd would go nuts cheering them on, and then they'd have to stop and have a different member of the group take their place.

Nagasaki

For Dad's second weekend in Japan, we headed to Nagasaki, which is on the west coast of the island of Kyushu, about 4 hours by bullet train and limited express train from my place.
I had never been there before, and as there was a big festival going on that weekend, I thought it would it would be a neat place to check out.
It was a very nice, small, hilly city. One of the nicest things about it, for me, was there were almost no bicycles. In Japan, bikes go on the sidewalk with the pedestrians, and so everywhere you go, you have bikes weaving in and out passing you, just missing you by centimetres. Half the people on bikes aren't even watching in front of them. They're either busy texting on their cellphones, or riding side-by-side (taking up the whole sidewalk in the process) talking to their friends. It drives me nuts!
Anyways, enough of my rant. Nagasaki, by Japanese standards is very foreign. The Portuguese and Dutch started doing business here a few hundred years ago, and because of its proximity to China, there is also a very strong Chinese influence.
The picture at the top is from Chinatown at night. The second picture was a really cool wall with a dragon at what I think was the Chinese Consulate.
The last picture is an arch in the area known as Glover Gardens, which was the area of the city where the wealthy Western merchants used to live.

Tokyo Festival

Okay, I'm finally catching up with my posting. This will be my last one from when Fudge was here in August.
So after we climbed Fuji, we found a cheap hotel for the night, and then headed into Tokyo first thing in the morning. Because it was Sunday, I wanted to take him to Harajuku to show him all the freaks in the crazy clothing (pictures of this in a previous post).
Anyways, it turned out that there was a big dancing festival in Yoyogi park which was nearby, with groups of up to about 30 people performing on 2 different stages. It was quite entertaining, as they all had very interesting costumes. Afterwards we went and checked out the parade that was happening on Omotesando, which is sort of like a high-end version of Robson Street in Vancouver.
This girl's group was relaxing before they had to dance, so I charmed her into letting us take a picture.

Matsumoto

Back in August when Fudge was out, after I had finished working for the week, he and I met up in Matsumoto. This small city is in the central mountains of Japan, near Nagano.
Matsumoto is famous throughout Japan for its castle, which is considered by many Japanese to be more beautiful than its more famous counterpart near me, Himeji Castle.
Our plan was to check out the city and the castle, and then blast down to Fuji to climb the mountain, which I discussed in an earlier post.
The castle is by far the biggest tourist draw here, but Fudge also showed me Frog Alley, which is a short little alley with a bunch of souvenir stores selling frog-themed crap of all shapes and sizes. There are also several frog themed sculptures, and I thought this one was really cool. It's two frogs with samurai swords, standing on the back of another frog.

Super Burger

Dad and I were wandering around the streets and temples of Kyoto one day a couple of weeks ago. By mid-afternoon we were both quite hungry so I decided to take him to an excellent okonomiyaki restaurant I'd been to a few times before that was in the area. However, when we finally got to the restaurant, it was closed. As we were starving by this point, we just went to the first restaurant we found that was open, which turned out to be an American-themed one.
As it is extremely difficult to find a good burger in Japan, I was reluctant to order one. However, as you can clearly see, this baby had everything, including avocado slices, bacon, chunks of fresh pineapple, and a fried egg. It was awesome!

Osaka Zoo

My Dad's been in Japan for the last two and a half weeks, so for his first weekend I met him in Osaka.
Tennoji Zoo was a 10 minute walk from our hotel, so we decided to go check it out. It was actually surprisingly big and most of the major animal species were represented (although we couldn't find the hippo they claimed existed - how does something that big hide?) It was also really cheap - I think only 500 yen ($5).
After the zoo, we went to several different places in the last couple of weeks, including Nagasaki, Kyoto, Himeji, and Tottori, and I will have posts about them soon.
However our adventures together have finished, as Dad left for Tokyo this morning and flies back to Vancouver on Tuesday.

Some More Bad English

I saw this shirt a couple of days ago in Nagasaki, and so I had to take a picture of it. Five bucks says she has absolutely no idea what it means.