I've been without internet for about two weeks now so I'll try to catch up quickly and in chronological order. Last weekend was the Hyottoko festival in Hyuga, in which there is much dancing and little clothing. It's fairly fantastic, the dance itself recounts a story in which a wily fox spirit seduces a beautiful princess. Meanwhile the villagers, knowing that this was a fox, watch and laugh.
This is what it generally looks like.
A number of the Miyazaki JETs got together and entered a group into the competition, we were all very proud.
Here they are just before the big parade:
Alex and I got harassed by some hilarious old men. I use the word 'harassed' in the loosest sense, as they bought us tons of food and beer. They even tried to set us up with these two festival mascot girls:
Afterwards a lot of us went off to what I have only heard referred to as "the secret beach" where we made a campfire, swam in the ocean, and generally chilled. The area is probably 40 minutes down a one lane highway serving two directions surrounded in forest. When we finally arrived we were at a beach no more than 200 meters long with mountains on either side. You could see more stars than I ever have, and everyone was all kinds of wonderful.
In the morning I made a pretty sad effort towards surfing, but it was not meant to be.
Bonus puppets:
and they provided some really novel foods like pig's feet
and my favorite new thing: bees
I had some lovely drinks for the first time such as the Red Eye, which is beer and tomato juice, as well as a Burdock- vodka and grapefruit juice. I topped it all off with a dip in the onsen. Overall a really lovely evening.
The following day was the proper Hi no Kuni Matsuri in which they pour buckets of water on the streets to cool everything down and bring peace (what). There is a massive parade of dancing that goes around the town, each group performing a slightly different take on the traditional dance. There was a fantastic group of what I think were ballroom dancers that had a really tickling version of it, but most stuck to tradition. My pictures from this weekend are all pretty miserable, but I'll show you what I can.
This past weekend I wandered over to Kumamoto for the Hinokuni Matsuri ("Country of Fire Festival" if you want to be literal about things) and to meet up with the Kumamoto JETs. It's a mere 2000 yen for the two hour bus ride. I'll write more about the festival later, for now I just want to share about a really wonderful restaurant I came across. It's called Asperge ... "Like the syndrome" to quote a Kuma-JET. For something like 1300 yen (not much more than $10) you get a really impressive three course lunch. I should explain that good western food is really hard to come by in Japan, and when it is good it's usually obscenely expensive. This place served the best French food I've yet to have, and it only had about 4 tables.
Then the same soup again. And for the third...
Delicious.
This is what it generally looks like.
