Harvest Festival

I'm off instructing a week-long course for Outward Bound Japan. I leave you photos of a recent harvest festival held in our village. Tomoe's mother and niece were in attendance. Her father had to leave the day before for work.

The festival was a lot of fun and we were one of the main attractions. The sign behind the speakers in the photo above say "Welcome to Tsukioka, Kevin & Tomoe". Every area of the village had a separate seating area. We were lucky enough to have sat exaclty where we should have (we had no idea of the order). We later made our rounds greeting the other areas, discovering our big mistake - we brought a large mug to drink from, meaning everyone had to fill it with LOTS of sake and, of course, we had to drink it. (not really theworst mistake anyone could make.)

Two of the bottles of sake were a gift from us. The interesting thing about this is that, when asked, our neighbor told us we should bring sake "in a box". The "in a box" part was stressed. We had no idea what thismeant , but when we visited the local coop, the had prices listed for sake "by the bottle" and "with a box". When we asked them for the "in a box" sake, but the asked our names and used a computer and printer right there at the checkout to print a label for the box with our names on it. Later, at the beginning of thefestival, they read the names of everyone who contributed the five boxes of sake.

After the festival we took her mother and niece out to gather mountain walnuts.

As always, I want to write more, but I have to go to bet, and my time tonight was taken by other things - We spent the night watching Little House on thePrairie DVDs as we broke open our sesame pods in the hopes that they will dry faster, beating the impending snow. We spent two hours and only finished a fifth of the pods.