We went to the Hamamatsu Kite Festival the first weekend we arrived. The participants spend all year making 15 foot kites that fight each other on sand dunes on the ocean. About a million or so people attend every year and hundreds of kites go up. There are teams of twenty or thirty people required to fly the massive kites and try to take other kites down by using friction to cut the hemp rope. When one team manages to down a kite, they run around with drums and trumpets, screaming and yelling and then hoist (I am not kidding) this one handicapped guy into the air for about 20 minutes... raising him up and down. (Please laugh, so I am not the only horrible person who laughs). And the same guy gets wheeled around to every winning team. In all fairness, though... he did seem to be having fun.(?).
Here is a very short video... which is pretty typical of our life here. Us listening to Carlos babble about the food he wants and then witnessing some really odd (in the eye of the beholder) Japanese cultural thing. Here, we are on our way to the kite festival on the train. I don't know why the end makes me laugh so hard, but it does.
Below is a slideshow of some photos. I didn't mean to make it into a slideshow... I don't really know what happened. The computer even added some lovely, and totally inappropriate, classical guitar music (that also makes me laugh) to go along with the slide show. Also note the last shot with the appetizing banana snacks.
OK. Going to bed.
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