Wow! I am ‚Ç?@‚‚©‚ꂽ! These past few days have been fantastic.. I will start from the beginning.
Saturday 3rd, Sunday 4th and Monday 5th were my town's matsuri (festival).
On Friday night, we picked up Takeshi Ishii (I stayed with Takeshi when I went to Itami 2 years ago with school (Osaka, Hyogo-ken) and stayed at my house when he came to my Australian school for two weeks). For those of you who want to know how Takeshi is going, he has become the Kendo Captain and is 2 dai? (Some sort of kendo level?). The next day had been all planned for us and we were to be going to Nakatajima ’†“c“‡?@to fly the huge small car sized kites with ishimizu san (A Rotarian from my club)?@and his town (Hikuma-cho). I got a bit of a tan and a red neck from staying in the sun a lot of the day, but I had a great time. I was allowed to fly the kite by myself for a few minutes, but I only lasted a few minutes because it is very tiring! You have to stand up and then site down with the string to create a kind of wind for the kite to fly while running backwards and then suddenly you run forward I think to get the kite to catch the wind and finally get up by itself in the sky. In order to do this, everyone runs around in a circle pulling the rope as they go to bring the kite up in the air. The kites are flown to celebrate the birth of a first son and each kite is dedicated to that child with their family symbol on the kite. During the child's kite's flight, they carry the child on their shoulders while everyone crowds around them and shouts 'Washoi!' with the drums, horns and whistles. After flying the kites and running around for a while we all got very tired and everything started finishing up so we went home to sleep... Not much sleep was done as we only had an hour and also the Rotarian snored like you have never heard someone snore before!! At around 6:30 p.m. we left and walked to the city's HQ where all the people going in the festival (from this part of the town) meet. Everyone from the same section of the town all where the same happi (a type of coat with the kanji of your town printed on the back (this is your ticket into the town's festival). At the night festival, we all got together at the HQ and then marched around the streets of the town. On the way throught the town we make a lot of noise (using the drums, rappa and whistle and everyone who is just marching goes 'washoi!' to the houses of the first son to eat and drink. When they get to the house they run around the flags of the town with the music and shout 'BANZAI!' a few times and then run around the flags again and then banzai and around and banzai... by the end you are so tired. We then either go to the next house or stay at that house so eat heaps and also drink heaps (not that I would drink anything as I am a Rotary exchange student) but wow can Japanese people drink at festivals! At the house where you stay for a while, the family supplies a sake (japanese alcohol) bottle with the photo of the child on it and everyone pours it into a big bowl to drink from or just drink from the bottle (as another town did when I saw it) while everyone chants 'washoi!' (or at one town they sang 'when the Saints go marching in' in Japanese.
That was about the end of it as I had to go home. The next day would be pretty big too as everyone would be coming.