A little exploring and a little festivaling...


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July 8th 2007
Published: July 8th 2007
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Here are a few pictures of my recent walkabouts and random wanderings through Shizuoka.

Last weekend Dawn and I decided to take the Shizutetsu (the local train) to a neighborhood near Ito Yokado (where we work) to just explore a little bit. We got off the train a stop after our stop for work and just started walking. We ran into all kinds of crazy things, Japanese Driving School courses, bamboo forests, Japanese neighborhoods, massive Japanese apartment complexes, driving ranges, a small park which led to a shrine (which I have included some pictures of), a huge cemetery and a street of traditional style buildings. We didn't know where exactly we were going and didn't have anything in particular in mind to find, we were just wandering and stumbled upon some pretty neat stuff.

We talked about how one of our favorite parts of traveling was just walking around somewhere and enjoying whatever we just happen to come across, its much more relaxing than planning a big trip somewhere and feels much more authentic than doing all the "touristy" things. We also talked about what a wonderful thing it was that we could discover these new things within our very own home city 😊. We came to the conclusion that one of the blessings of traveling and seeing the world through a tourist's eyes is the fact that everything from seeing Japanese driving school courses to finding new neighborhood shrines feels like an adventure! Something about simple days like these kind of overwhelm me with this sense that I am so blessed because I feel present in my life and feel as though I am really getting to live all the moments of it. There is so much beauty in simplicity!

The rest of the pictures are of a popular festival in Japan called Tanabata. I did a little bit of reading up on the festival and found out that it is a day where people of all ages write down a wish on a special piece of long, rectangular paper called Tanzaku. They then hang the wishes up on a bamboo branch. The festival celebrates the meeting of two lovers -- Orihime and Hikoboshi. The story goes that Ohrime - a very talented seamstress and Hikoboshi, a cattle herder fell in love immediately the first time they met, thanks to an arrangement made by Ohrime's father. They married soon after they met, however following their marriage they both began to neglect their work and so Ohrime's father forbade the lovers to see each other baning each to an opposite side of the milky way. Ohrime became extremely depressed and her father recognized this and so allowed the lovers to meet once a year on the 7th day of the 7th month of the year. I'm not quite sure why the Japanese people are so interested in this story and have dedicated a festival to it, but I won't question too much. I think that celebrating the reunion of two lovers sounds very romantic and magical so I am all for it 😊.

I went to the festival with Emi and we made wishes and hung them up on a bamboo tree. We also saw many pinata type decorations, everything from Anpanman and his crew to Mt. Fuji. The pinatas are hung above streets and have long white strips of paper flowing beneath them---the kids get a lot of joy out of walking through them and so do the more playful adults.

Besides all the pinatas and wish making one of my favorite things about the festival was seeing all the Japanese girls dressed up in summer yukatas (less formal versions of kimonos). I am definitely going to buy one before the summer ends.

Oh and I included one picture of Ben, Dawn and I at work 😉. That's us being our silly selves in the teacher work room. That picture deserves an entire blog on its own, but I will save that for another time.
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11th July 2007

awesome
Hey Sarah, Awesome that you got to see this festival. I, too, have never heard of this story. But Japanese culture generally favors odd numbers so I'm not surprised about the 7th of the 7th...
11th July 2007

meow
HOLA HERMANA! me encanta las fotos y tambien los cuentos de tu visita a un otro parte de shizuoka y tambien de la festival. Tambien me gusta la historia del Ohime y su amante. Que dia tan especial, no? El 07/07/07 :) hehe. Me encanta ver tu cara tan hermosa. Te quiero te quiero te quiero! BESOS

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