Saturday

After that long night, I had a slow start on Saturday. I abandoned my plans to go shopping in the morning and instead slept in until I was supposed to meet with Orihara-san, Nakamura-san, and Hashimoto-san at the train station.

It was hot.

There aren't too many pictures here b/c I had forgotten to charge my camera the night before, and it had already been dying. So I did w/e I could :)

I left around 2 something for our meeting up at three and even with just walking a little ways to the train station, I was drenched in sweat. I was glad I had brought a handkerchief. Going to the fireworks festival had been planned for a while I think, as had the blues thing from the night before. Both events were relatively close to each other, I just had to get back to Machida station.

I met up with them around 3:30 (I was late) at Machida station and we set off to a department store. I have to go back to Machida to go shopping. Sure it cost 4 bucks and 45 minutes just to get there, but it was much less expensive than anywhere in central Tokyo. I shopped for a few things and then they took me to buy a jinbei (which I then wore for the festival). Quick culture lesson. At festivals, it's traditional to wear yukatas (robes with the bow on the back) or jinbeis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinbei). They were all in there yukatas and they bought me (fighting all my protests) a jinbei. On the back it says golden fish, which I'm told is an awesome thing in Japanese culture (they're rare in Japan?)

Machida is also home to the largest 100 yen shop (though things inside do often cost more than 100 yen) in Japan. We stopped by there to buy some tape for our tarp. Then we were off. We hopped back onto the train after a ways walk and headed to the Atsugi station. As we got closer and closer to the field slash river area that was designated for watching the fireworks, it started getting crowded.


In the Greater Toyko area there are 35 million people. And as I walked with Kanami, I was talking to her about Shu-he Fukada... two seconds later we ran into him. 35 MILLION people. How is that possible? We stopped to document the rarity... plus you can see us all dressed up. :)

Once we saw the field, it was crazy. In total there were half a million people there. We got there a solid hour or two early and it was still packed.

The food, however, rocked. I'm a simple person. I don't need fancy food or proper utensils. This was my kind of food. It can only really be described as a Japanese carnival. There were tons of vendors making all types of culinary food food, shaved ice, cotton candy, drink stands, to name a few. Among the food stands, there was baked potato and corn, steak on a stick, fish on a stick (the entire fish skewered, it was VERY popular), Osaka style okonomiyaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki), lo mein (it's actually something else, but I forget what they called it and it kinda resembled lo mein, dumplings, etc etc. The line of vendors didn't end. And since I hadn't properly eaten in a while (missed lunch Friday, didn't eat too much at the Jazz thing, and hadn't eaten since then), I made up for it and bought steak on a stick and okonomiyaki. All four of us returned, set up our tarp and we spread out our goods and shared :). Twas yummy.

Click Me! (just to give you an idea of the number of people.)

Now we had some time to pass since we had gotten there early, and I had a deck of cards. I learned a very awesome and simple card game. Not entirely sure what it's called, but it was cool. It goes like this. You deal out all the cards + one joker mixed in. The goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards. The only way to get rid of cards, is by pairing them. So right when the game starts you pull out all your pairs and then proceed in a circle. When it's your turn, you pick a card from the person who just went without knowing what the card is, hoping that that card will pair one of yours so you can get rid of more cards. Since there is one joker, that means one person is going to be left a sitting duck with nothing to pair, praying that someone will accidentally choose the joker from their hand and relieve them of that burden.

Seems simple enough right? And like a game of complete luck? That's what I thought. Yet somehow I managed to lose the first three games. lol. They enjoyed that. Even when it looked like I was going to win first, I somehow managed to lose royally. Oh and in one round, the joker kept going around the circle. Meaning if the person I'm taking from has 3 cards and only one of them is a joker, how did I end up getting the joker 4 times in a row! (Not to mention the fact that the person after me kept getting the joker from my hand). Maybe there's a conspiracy... the game KNEW I was Japanese.

Afterwards I amused them with some magic and then the show started.


The entire fireworks show lasted 1 hr 40 minutes. Nuts right? It started out slow and didn't really light up the night sky, but gradually got bigger and bigger. To be honest it wasn't the biggest set of fireworks I've seen, but definitely one of the best. They had a much wider variety, shooting up smiley's, saturn's, ones that changed colors, then spun, and then did some more tricks. At one point, they even spelled out SONY in the air. It'd 've been really impressive if they could have pulled off some kanji.

One of my favorite shots of the night

Oh and you know you're with a bunch of science folks when a firework goes off and they yell out "hey look an epithelial cell!" or something to that effect. In the videos you'll also hear lots and lots of "Sigoi" meaning "great!!!"

The entire event was fairly well organized. After the show was finished, that's over 500,000 people to get out of there at one time, and granted it was slow at some points, it was a very efficient process. They added trains to the train station and I think we made it to the point where we could walk normally in about 15-20 minutes.

They all know how much I like ramen... so we went in search of a ramen shop. By this point, I'm sweating through my jinbei but very much enjoying the night walk. I'm spending a lot of time learning Japanese as we see things I don't know words for and as I get used to hearing more and more Japanese in a non-lab sense (I learned the word for centrifuge before I learned the word for help). Most places were closed and I kind've felt bad that we kept searching (I knew they were doing it for me, and I didn't have the heart to tell them I wasn't hungry anymore) but we found one and waited in the queue. For the first time in my life, I had wonton ramen. Okay so really it was just a salt-based ramen with wontons in it. But hey it was good.



Oh and I found actually chinese hot oil in that place! But I was told putting it in my soup was odd. Shucks.

I learned a lot about Japanese superstition that night though (through some VERY awkward moments). We were all stuffed to the brim and there was one dumpling left so I suggested Hashimoto-san and I split it. Well it was a potsticker so it wasn't easy to split. When it was partly split open, I held one side and motioned for her to pull the other side and suddenly a got an astounding "::gasp:: No" from all sides. Apparently pulling food apart with two people is seriously taboo b/c Japanese people do that with the bones of the deceased. You're also not supposed to drag the tips of your chopsticks off the edge of your plate. At least in American, pulling apart bones and such means good luck right? Wishbone?

Another similar situation. I crossed my fingers at work and said "good luck!" and they were confused. Though this one is not as well known, crossing your fingers is like saying "Bad bad evil spirits! Yelch." Or something like that. Just another negative superstition in Japanese that means good luck in English. Hmm.

The number 4 superstition is also in Japan too b/c like Chinese, their word for four has the same sound as the word for death. Dum Dum Dum. So some hotels have no 4th, 14th, 24th... floors.

After we finished up our ramen, we headed back to the train station for home. It was a while before I made it back, but they all waited for me until I left. It was like having my own aunts and aunt-cousins (Kanami is only 28/29) in Japan.

And then I went home.