Trip Pictures #3

Hey everybody! More trip pictures, but first I wanted to say that I was able to fix the last post, so if you wanted some context on the pictures of me eating various things, now you can read all about it.  Don't worry, I have more pictures of me eating things for those interested, but today is about a matsuri.

 

Here we are getting ready to go to Gaina Matsuri, Yonago's biggest festival.  Matsuri translates roughly to festival, and Gaina is Yonago dialect for big.  It's traditional for women to wear yukatas and men to wear jimbeis to festivals, which is what we were doing. The vast majority of people just wear their everyday clothes, but you'll generally see people dressed like this at any sizable matsuri. I bought the jimbei for pretty cheap and she already had the yukata. I opted not to buy geta, the traditional wooden sandals because they're not exactly useful or comfortable, while I can sleep in a jimbei. Women sort of get the short end of the stick here because jimbeis are basically just two part robes that are very comfortable, but Mie couldn't even get into hers without assistance because the belt mechanism is so complex.

 

Here are Mie's older sister and her kids, Misato (girl) and Tetsuya (boy). Misato decided to dress up, too, and I think it suits her, though apparently it was pretty tight. They're wearing the traditional crocs, if you can't tell.

 

And here is (for the time being) my only picture of the actual festival.  Generally festivals look a lot like you would expect, with tons of people selling festival food and drink. There are also usually taiko performances and other stuff like that. This picture shows a thing that is unique to Gaina, though, which is a sort of balancing contest.  It's hard to see, but that's a giant pole with lanterns hanging off it, and the people in the street there are trying to balance it. They balance it on their heads and hands and necks and all sorts of things, increasing the height of the thing every time they manage to balance it. It's pretty impressive.

Ok, so that is pretty much it for the festival stuff. Time to get back to research, I guess.

Trip Pictures #2

Update: blogger stopped being stupid, so I was able to put up explanations of the pictures. The ketchup and mustard face was my doing, by the way.

 

This is us eating takoyaki in Osaka.  Osaka has two foods that it is supposedly famous for, takoyaki and okonomiyaki.  Takoyaki is basically fried dough balls that have octopus (among other things) in them.  This place was really good takoyaki.  Okonomiyaki is basically cabbage pancakes, but actually Hiroshima style is better.

 

We had a barbecue with some of Mie's friends at her friend's family's house, which was pretty delightful.  Here's me eating something, probably meat.  It was very bright out, so that's why I was squinting.

 

Here's a picture of Mie's mom and me eating, mostly sashimi, but also some cooked fish and whatnot. That guy in the background is from some other prefecture and was of course interested in what the gaijin was doing in this little izakaya way out in the inaka.  Mie was there, too, but she was taking the picture.

 

Another one of the barbecue.  The guy's grandma was really nice and kept bringing us stuff to eat, including watermelon (gag). I was being polite and all but I would rather eat nothing than watermelon, and I think she felt bad that I couldn't eat it, so she went to all the trouble of making green tea by hand (like an improvised tea ceremony).  It was super nice of her and really good tea, too.  In this picture we are toasting using bamboo that we cut down and were using as sake cups.  Apparently this is a traditional way of drinking sake and I have to say that the bamboo smell really makes it better.

 

Here's more of me eating, probably mozuku, which is like a really slimy seaweed. Mie wanted me to eat it because I was saying that there's no way most Americans would even think of it as food. It really looks like pond scum or something, but it had a nice flavor (some kind of sauce), and at this point no food textures bother me at all.

 

Another toast, but this time with Mie on the left there.  New sunglasses, by the way.

Again, more delicious food. The towel around the neck thing is what I refer to as 超ジャパニーズ, "chou japaniizu" or very Japanese. You see people with towels around their necks all over the place during the summer because it is so handy to be able to wipe sweat off yourself in the oppressive heat and humidity. It also prevents sunburn, which is much appreciated.

Trip Pictures

Alright, here is the long awaited post with trip pictures.  I assume I won't get through all of them in one post because there are a ton. These are all pictures from Mie's phone. I actually have more pictures on my camera (thanks, Dan!) but I can't actually upload them directly to my Mac because it seems totally reasonable for a digital camera to have that problem nowadays (???).  Anyway, I will probably upload them to my work computer and then move them or some such thing.  Ok, here goes.

Here's a picture of me drinking some Green Dakara (warning: unbelievably cute commercial).  It looks like the road is slanting up because it is. This is Daisen (literally "big mountain"), one of the biggest mountains in western Japan, not too far from where we were. It's good for skiing in the winter and climbing in the summer.

And some more pictures of Daisen.  Sorry they are mostly of me, but, again Mie's phone.  It was a nice day, and we intended to go the shrine which is only part of the way up the mountain since my previous experiences at Daisen were all either skiing or beer drinking, but since it wasn't very far, we decided to go a little bit farther up the mountain before turning around.  Unfortunately, it turns out the path doesn't meet up with another path until most of the way up the mountain, which meant that we ended up climbing the mountain unintentionally.




That gate there is the entrance to the shrine, and that thing spitting out water is, well, a thing spitting out water.  It is for washing your hands before entering the shrine proper.  You can sort of make out on the sign, which was where our path finally crossed with another one.  To the left is the way to the top, 1.2 km up, to the right, the way down, 1.6 km, and you can barely see it, but the way we came was 2.3 km, I think. This was all done in just sneakers because we hadn't planned on actually climbing the mountain. There were tons of people going up and down the mountain with all their gear, which was kind of hilarious.  It's not like you can't do it without gear, though. There's no scaling a rock face or anything, just kind of hiking uphill.

Since blogger is weird with pictures, I think I will split this into multiple posts.

只今！

So I just got back from Japan a little bit ago. Sorry for the lack of updates on that, but I had little to no internet access over the last couple months, but now I have good internets again and also a bunch of pictures of the trip, although they are mostly pictures of me making faces in front of stuff, so I will get to posting that tomorrow or later. As for now I must get my body back on EST.