Festival!!!!

This past Sunday Damien and I went to the annual Inuyama spring festival. Inuyama was the town we went to with Jeremy that has a small original castle. The festival was wonderful. The main attractions were 13 floats that are moved around the city streets. These floats are three tiered, made of wood and lacquer and some of them are centuries old. In fact, this festival has been going on since 1650. One thing that sets these floats apart from other cities' floats are karakuri. Karakuri are large marionettes (also very old) that are partly automated and partly controlled by people on the second story of the float. They do a little performance for the crowd before being moved down the street. The floats themselves are very tall and very heavy. When the crew of about 10-20 men lift it up to turn it around, your breath stops! The whole thing looks like it is going to fall apart! And the first level of it is filled with children playing drums and other people playing flutes. But then they are successful in turning it or moving it a little and everyone on the street claps and cheers.
At night the floats are covered with 365 lanterns each. Believe it or not each paper lantern has a candle in it with a real flame. So let me explain this again, century-old, wooden, floats, covered in flammable lacquer paint and filled with children are covered with hundreds of tiny fires and pushed and pulled around by a bunch of guys through narrow streets lined with power lines. Oh, did I mention the floats are are followed by 2-3 support staff pushing giant coolers full of beer for the pushing crew? At one point one of the lanterns caught on fire and it was thrown off into the street!! But amazingly nothing bad happens and everyone has a good time.
I have to mention the food we had! We love Japanese festival food: the tastes, the smells, the sounds of the vendors saying, "irashaimase!" with cigarettes dangling precariously from their mouths. Here is a rundown of what we had: grilled squid on a stick, takoyaki (dough balls filled with octopus), okonomiyaki (pork and cabbage pancake), taiyaki (grilled cake filled with sweet bean paste or custard), chijimi (spicy Korean kimchi pancake), choco-banana, candied strawberry, grilled chicken on a stick and a honey and cream crepe. We were stuffed!!!
The other highlights of the festival were the cherry blossoms that were falling on the crowd like snow and the small Japanese flea market we found where we bought a 90 year old hand-painted wall scroll. It is not in the best condition so we didn't pay what it would be worth in better shape. But it is beautiful and I have always wanted to buy one. I will post a picture of it when we put it up.