Golden Week - 2023 (Giant Kites and Festa Machida)


 


Golden Week in Japan often means big crowds and bad traffic, so we keep it local - nothing that requires  driving!

        This year we once again rode our bikes to the Zama Giant Kite festival. Last year the festival was smaller, with no food vendors. This year it was much bigger, lots of food vendors, taiko drums, and even a sumo wrestling ring set up for junior sumo wrestlers. The wind was great and the giant kites flew high! 

We took the first picture below a few weeks ago while they were still building the kites. They are so big they could not be transported along the skinny Japanese roads, so they building them in the fields by the river where they will fly them.



 








Here you can see several Giant kites all flying at once. We discovered there are multiple festivals along the river, each with a different program and booths. I think we like the Sagamihara Kite festival the best because it is in a less dusty area.




They have tons of fire engines at the festivals. I think this is due to the fact that at the end of the festival they burn the kites. The time for the kite burning is even in the schedule. However, this year it was quite windy and I don't think they did the burn. The firemen probably called it off. We were going to watch but it never happened, as far as we could tell. (Dad thinks it's hilarious that the firemen wear their helmets all the time)



There we a lot of food vendors. I got okonomiyaki from this guy. It was a very different style than I have had before, but very good. So many eggs! He placed an egg on top of each one. Dad got BBQ squid on a stick (it looked just like it sounds) but unfortunateley, we didn't take a picture.













On Saturday we took the train to Festa Machida. We watched some dancers/drummers from Okinawa perform as they moved down the street.

































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wonderful Week in Tohoku

Image
  We took an extended trip over the Memorial Day holiday (and my birthday) and visited the Tohoku region of Japan. Tohoku basically covers the northern third of the main island of Honshu. It's a big, beautiful region with the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Sea of Japan on the other. We got a JR East rail pass that gave us unlimited use of the Shinkansen during our trip, so we were able to jump all around the area from Sendai to Hachinohe to Aomori to Akita. At the end of the trip we each tried to pick our favorite spot or activity and neither of us could pick just one. We loved everything about this trip! Our approach was to combine our Shinkansen trips with car rentals near the major stations. The Shinkansen gets you to the main city and then having a car allows you to easily and conveniently get out to the more remote locations. Just to give a feel for the travel times, it was about 2 hours one way on the train between the major cities (Tokyo to Sendai, Sendai to Aomori, Send...
Read more

Exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures

Image
  We spent a wonderful 5 days exploring Shimane and Tottori Prefectures over the Labor Day weekend. We had an early morning flight to Izumo and so we decided the best option was to spend the night in the Hotel Villa Fontaine which is attached to the Haneda Airport. It turned out to be a very convenient way to make the flight that left at 7am. On our way to the airport, we bumped into one of Kimball's co-workers. When he heard where we were headed he told us his wife was from Shimane. He highly recommend we stop at Izumo Taisha, a very old and famous shrine (Top 100, for sure!). So, on his advice we made that our first stop of the day.  It was a lovely place and by visiting we became educated on the story of the rabbit hopping from Oki Island to the mainland on the backs of many hundreds of sharks. Right at the end, the sharks got mad because they thought the rabbit had tricked them. So, they bit off the rabbits fur and left him to suffer in the saltwater and sun. Three brother...
Read more

Kanazawa November 2025

Image
One of the main reasons we applied to extend our stay in Japan until December, is so that we could enjoy one more autumn season.  We had heard that Kenrokuen Garden (one of the Top 3 gardens in Japan) was beautiful in the fall so we decided to make Kanazawa one of our last trips.  Kanazawa is known as the "little Kyoto", but we were surprised to find it is not "little" at all. It's quite a big city. It has a feeling of both modern and old all wrapped in one. We took the Shinkansen from Tokyo (our favorite way to travel in Japan). The Kanazawa train station has some very unique architecture.   At the station we were able to get on a Loop Bus that made stops at many of the sites in the city. Our first stop was Higashi Chaya, a very nicely preserved Edo period district. It is also an area where there are many tea rooms and Geisha working there. We saw a women dressed in Geisha clothing running down one of the side streets - she must have been late to something. (Si...
Read more