Fire cats (w/ video)

Winter is ending, and the cats come to play in the fires at Hazu.

We went to the Toba Hi Matsuri or Toba Fire Festival in Hazu again this year. We went by train and then met some friends down there.

Festivals are one of my favorite things. In America, festivals are great.. Irish Fest, Indianapolis Labor Day fireworks, Indiana State Fair, your hometown's random city festival ^_^). In Japan, they REALLY know how to make a festival, and they have had hundreds of years to perfect them.

Sum up of the basics of this festival: After walking around at the booths.. catching your fill of goldfish, eating your fill of chocolate-covered bananas, get your spot around the two giant bonfires-to-be. We have a secret spot in the trees behind the bonfires. Well, we thought it was secret but, this year there were about a hundred people there :(

At the starting time, you'll hear the chink, chink, chink of flint against stone: building a fire from the bottom up. A victory shout signals the successful spark, and then the bonfires are lit.



There is a sacred tree inside each of the fires--one for each team, the east and the west. Once the fires begin to roar, the two teams of local Hazu-ites--dressed in traditional festival wear--begin to race up ladders, into the bonfires! They are racing to pull out their team's sacred tree. If the east wins, then there will be a good harvest. If the west wins, there will be a bad harvest. But, our friend says, both teams try hard to win anyway. This is a video! Note the fire falling all over the guys and them jumping off as they catch on fire!




The festival wear is one of the best parts: they fashion the black and white banners of last year's festival into costumes that cover them from head to toe. The end result makes them look just like little calico cats! Meow! or since they're Japanese, nya~! ^_^

The Secret Language of Inches and our Mikawa-wan Bicycle Odyssey

My friend (Minority) and I are planning a bike trip and I'm trying to squeeze comprehension out of the massive amount of kilometers we have to ride. Japan speaks in kilometers, centimeters, Centegrade, kilos, and other confusing numbers.

In short, numbers are difficult for this American girl. Don't even get me started on how strange counting in Japanese is for English-speakers.... zero, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, ten ten thousand, hundred ten thousand, thousand ten thousand, oku. And then there's all the counters and stuff. Ok i guess I started, but I'm finished now.

But, when we talk about height, and I'm trying to get an image of how much 176 centimeters actually is compared to the boys I have known my whole life... Hark! My British friend says he is 5 foot 11! I feel like we just have made a huge mental link! Someone speaks inches! I'm 5 foot 8! How cool is that! What else can we talk about?? But, alas, that's about as far as our conversation in inches can reach.... if I ask him how much he weighs, he say something about 9 1/2 stones. Stones. 9 1/2. I have absolutely no concept of what that is.... alas. But, every so often, I still ask a British guy (er, I don't know any British girls right now..) or my Filipino friend how tall he is, just to feel this special glow felt in the presence of a inch-measured human. ^_^

But our trip! We originally planned to take our bicycles up to the big city above us, Nagoya. About 41 kilometers, so 82 round trip. But, we decided that would be a pretty boring route, since there's just a lot of nothing between here and Nagoya. So, we are taking a friend's suggestion (enter friend Al Capone ^_^) and bicycling around Mikawa Bay instead! Mikawa-wa, or Bay the area right around our city Nishio.




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This is just a rough look at our trip. It will be around 134 kilometers, or about 83.2637 miles. We are taking two days to to it ^_^, crashing in a manga cafe for the night. We're excited... we'll be around the ocean for a good part of it, and hopefully get to stop off at a couple of tiny random places along the way. ^_^ Oh yeah, lol. No, we're not planning to test our supernatural powers by cycling over the top of the sea... there's a ferry from peninsula to peninsula we can take our bikes on ^_^.

We leave at dawn! (Or actually 8 a.m. ^_^)

PHOTO NOTES:

- The pictures were taken on on the top of a mountain-shrine in Hazu, about half an hour south of us by car. I went there by bicycle on day.. by accident actually. But it was a good day. I look so hot and tired right? Can you see the little fly around my head?? So annoying...

- I can speak to garden gnomes. They speak inches, too.