Sunday, we went to the Aoba Festival in downtown Sendai. Aoba Shrine is the resting place of Date Masumune, Sendai's founder. We were met with the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a festival that you would find in any town, but with an obviously Japanese theme.
Sendai is much larger than I had anticipated, with about a million residents. We walked to a Subway station on the opposite side of campus and took the Subway to downtown. We could hear the festival before we could see it. The fist thing we encountered was hundreds of people of all ages dressed in white robes with black hats. They were on a lunch break when we arrived, so they were all sitting around everywhere. We saw later that they were basically the parade helpers, carrying platforms and flags, and walking along with groups. We also saw many people in parade costumes and kimonos.
Next we were each given a green plastic bag and a pair of tongs to pick up trash with. We were told to bring back a bag of trash and exchange it for a resuable "Eco Bag".
Ogawa-san led us to an acrobatic performance, and then we walked past all of the colorful booths.
We picked a spot on the main street to watch the parade. It was so beautiful! But after nearly an hour of watching dozens of groups doing the *same* sparrow dance to the *same* song, we decided to leave to find some lunch.
Dragon, a friend of Ogawa-san, joined us for lunch and led us to a restaurant hidden in the basement of a shopping center. Ootoya was a lovely little place with amazing food. I had a chicken soup, and others had various soup, fish, and rice dishes. When we went back oustide an hour and a half later, the parade was amazingly *still* going on! We couldn't believe it was so long!
We did a bit of shopping with Dragon, then we took our trash bags back to the stand and traded them in for Eco Bags. Then we all tried a popular festival snack: chocolate-dipped, sprinkle-covered banana-on-a-stick. Tasty!
When we got back to UpTen, everyone played a card game called Mao. The rules of Mao:
1. No talking during the game.
2. When you win, you make a new rule.
3. No talking about the rules.
It was hysterical! The most hilarious rule was when Rebecca made everyone sing "I'm a Little Teapot", complete with motions (shhh! Don't tell anyone that I talked about the rules!).
We all went to Mr. and Mrs. Ogawa's house along with some of our new friends for supper and worship. Mrs. Ogawa made Tomato Rice, Chicken in Cream Sauce, Green Salad, and California Rolls. Yum yum yum yum! After supper, we sang some songs together and then studied Matthew 10:1-23. It was such a wonderful study, but we were all exhausted by the end of the two-language lesson!
2 comments:
After reading this post I immediately went to 2 websites. First, I went to biblegateway and read through Matthew 10. Then I went to wikipedia and looked up this Mao card game. Very interesting, especially some of the variant rules. By the way, great posts!
We are really enjoying reading your site everyday. The girls are enjoying the events of their last week of school. We sold our house last week to the first lookers! I guess it's time to start packing. Hope your having the time of your life!
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