hi, i'm jenn

actually, ume is pronounced ooo-meh – but i still like the title.

anyway, this weekend we went to Ayako’s home town of Saga to celebrate the plum festival called “ume matsuri”. this festival takes place at the nearby shrine that is up.
we arrived in saga around 3 on saturday, and had missed that day’s festivities. instead we headed into the city to see the “hina matsuri” festivities. more hina dolls! fat ones! skinny ones! ice ones!

we also played a fan game where you had to flick the fan foward with your thumb, and try to knock something over. it took awhile, but i got it.

    

that night we chilled at ayako’s house with her family. ate oden for dinner, and watched TV. we watched some very interesting TV (i’ll talk about it in another post) and crashed fairly early.

 

Sunday we were up and out of Ayako’s house before ten to head to the local shrine. A 5 minute walk away was an amazingly long and steep set of stone steps. up we went…

    

at the top they served us koi-koku (miso soup with koi in it). none of us liked it very much, so we tossed it over the side. ayako and mayumi finished theirs.

 

jess and i donned the green “staff” robes and started to help ayako’s mom serve the hot plum juice. it was fun.



now, normally there aren’t many foreigners, but at this festival chad, eric, jess and i were the *only* ones there. it was hilarious. people were talking to us left right and centre. the bands, and MCs talked to us. a jazz singer stopped, and asked me: “when i sing in english, do you understand the words?” i told her she was “josu” (= very good). another band said they will try to speak english to us. i yelled “GAMBARE!” They liked that. Chad was photographed almost as much as if he was a plum tree.

    

The day was jam packed with performances by Taiko drummers, a jazz band, a few random rock bands, Kendo, and of course, karaoke. We thought about singing, but apparently you had to pre-register and bring your own tape. So that was it for that idea.

   

The day ended with Bingo. There was also bingo earlier in the day, and I had won — but there were a bunch of winners at the same time, and only one prize left. We had to janken for it and I won. Oh, and Eric had a false bingo so that was pretty funny. But in the afternoon game, of the 7 of us, 6 won. Poor Chad was the only loser. In all fairness, someone gave me a winning card to call bingo on. Ayako was the first winner. She had mentioned earlier that she wanted strawberries, and got herself a big crate of them. I chose a plum bonsai tree. I was so excited. Eriko got one too. The others got a various assortment of ume-boshi, ume-jelly and other plum goodies. What a fun way to end the day!

    

So, after the festival wrapped up, we piled into the back of ayako’s mom’s truck with our goodies and had a fun ride back down the steep twisty turny roads.

  

The blossoms were beautiful. As you can imagine, we all got a little bit trigger happy. Here are a few pictures for now, and once I get them all together, I’ll add a link to my ume album. Click on the image to see a larger copy.

  
  

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:18 pm and is filed under japan, life, pics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.