Harry Potter and the Kokawa Festival...

On Saturday I took a quick train ride to Wakayama to see the new Harry Potter movie.  I was quite impressed with the theater, very nice and comfy seats (they are assigned by the way).  However, the ticket price for a 3D movie was 2100yen (about $27)!!!  Don't think I will be seeing any more movies while here.  The movie was entertaining but it had been a while since I saw the first part, so it was hard to remember where it left off (also a long while since I read the book).  The theater was in a little shopping complex.  I caved and bought some "Hello Kitty" slippers!  Sooo cute :)

I walked to a different train station to leave from and got some nice views...

Since it was already close to 4pm, I decided to take the train straight to Kokawa (another neighboring town) because they were having their festival this weekend.  The Kokawa temple was the first one I visited when I arrived in Kinokawa (my adventure that ended with the very bad sunburn).  I was quite early for the festivities, but I got to see the vendors setting up and took a stroll to see the temple grounds again.  They were also setting up the floats (which I will mention more of later).  There was a small ceremony going on at the temple, so I watched for a little while.

As I left the temple, I got to see some very nice drum performances.

At this time, the streets were starting to fill with more and more people.   About half the people were dressed in traditional yukata, kind of a summer-weight cotton alternative to a kimono, or jinbei which seemed to be a more casual version, it was a wrap top and shorts but also in the colorful prints (in the second picture below there is a taller girl in light pink towards the right wearing this, and in the third picture the girl on the left).  They were all so beautiful to look at.

I also started to get a little hungry, but what to eat... there were soo many different vendors.  They had takoyaki (if you remember from the Kyoto post), yakisoba, okonomiyaki, these kind of egg sandwiches on a wafer topped with like a teriyaki sauce and mayonaise (I mentioned it from my earlier Kinokawa post, but see the picture below).  I saw the cucumbers on a stick like in Kyoto, also hot dogs, french fries and snow-cones.  Speaking of snow-cones, when I first arrived I was walking by all the vendors and one of the dispensers with several flavors tipped over and I got snow-cone juices all over my feet.  Well, I finally decided on what looked to be meatballs, but turned out to be a rice-ball wrapped in beef, cooked on the skillet and topped with teriyaki sauce and mayonaise.  They seem to put mayonaise on just about everything here, but there is something different about Japanese mayonaise.  Not sure what it is, but it does taste a little different (in a very good way!)

As the evening progressed, the lanterns along the street and all the floats began to light up.

In this last picture you see two of the floats next to each other on the street.  The highlight of the festival... Every 20 minutes or so some guys carrying lanterns would go running up the street blowing whistles to get people out of the way.  This is because they were either pushing/pulling the floats up the street or running quite fast with them downhill while chanting.  Children were seated on them, and it seemed like they had a very good ride.

More beautiful yukata, and some ladies with hairstyles more ornate than others.  Yes, I finally gave in and flashed the peace sign for the picture.  I am posing with a fellow American I met earlier in the day.  Although I am enjoying Japan and the Japanese people are so friendly and welcoming, it felt sooo nice to talk with an American.

There were also games for children.  They are given a small net, and try to collect the floating balls or goldfish into a bowl.  But the netting is very delicate and didn't seem to last very long.

After we had enough walking, which we did for about 3-4 hours just up and down the same street, we ended the evening at a new Italian cafe that just opened near my apartment. The best part is the cappuccino drinks as they make designs with in froth.  The Japanese make everything so pretty and presentable.

Old friends reunited...

Yesterday I journeyed to Nara to meet up with a friend I haven't seen in 10 years!  Actually, not just a friend but a sorority sister from my year at UNLV.  Shiho lives in Nagoya, so we decided to meet somewhere in between.  Turns out she hadn't visited Nara in 20 years.

We met for a delicious lunch of Okonomiyaki and Yakisoba, dishes traditional for Osaka and the Kansai region (should've taken a picture).  Then we wandered around for a few hours.  Our first attraction was Nara Park, home to hundreds of deer.   They are not like the deer back home: shorter, stalkier and still have their spots.  They are a national treasure and regarded as "heavenly animals, protecting the city and country", because it is believed a mythological god arrived on a white deer to protect the newly built capital.  Up until almost 1700, it was actually punishable by death to slaughter one.  For the most part they are tame, and vendors sell deer biscuits.  There are signs though warning that the deer are wild animals and showed pictures that it was possible they would knock you down, head butt you, bite you, and there was even one of the deer stealing a woman's purse.  It was interesting to see that the deer don't go after the biscuits sitting there at the vendor stands, but the moment the biscuits are in the hand of a human...

Shiho barely got the biscuits over to me without the deer stealing them from her.  Even just sitting on a park bench we would be confronted by deer.  They tried to steal Shiho's tea from her purse and twice they stole the map out of mine.  Only about half the map remained after two tug-of-war battles with the deer, but at least it was the part showing the locations of the shrines :)

We also visited the Toodai-ji and the Daibutsuden within.  The last picture is of an old model of the grounds scaled 1:50.

Shiho and I made a donation and were able to sign a roof tile.  

We went to the Nara national museum afterwards.  Since it was so hot, it felt nice to walk around in air-conditioning for a couple hours.  There was a special exhibit on Xuanxang's 30,000-kilometer Buddhist pilgrimage to India.  On display was half of the Genjoo Sanzoo e, a pictorial biogrpahy of the priest's life.  We also saw several scrolls of the Daihannyakyo, The Great Wisdom Sutra, which were brought back from India and translated to Chinese.  Several ancient Buddhist statues were on display at the museum as well.  After our long day of wandering around Nara, we ended the day with dinner at a conveyer belt sushi restaurant.

We parted ways at the train station, but we will get to see each other at least once more when Jesse and I stop in Nagoya for the night on the way to Tokyo.