Balloon Shapes By Cops » Festivals (Matsuri)

Ashiya Festival and the Pizza Selling Stormtrooper

Silentjim — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:26:58 +0000

It’s Cherry Blossom Viewing (Hanami) time in Japan at the moment (well to be honest, it’s over now, but it was a couple of weeks ago), and this means sitting under cherry blossoms, drinking sake, wine or whatever and also, the first festivals of the year (for me anyway).

Ashiya Festival 2010

(Strangely this photo is almost identical to the one I took at last years Festival – must change my snapping position for next year)

The other weekend was Ashiya Festival, which I love as:
a) It’s up the road.
b) It has wine, sake, beer and food stalls.
c) It has little old ladies selling junk for charity at ridiculously cheap prices.
d) Live Bluegrass music

Don’t ask me why, but country and bluegrass music is very popular in this city it seems. Last year they had the guy who wrote the “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack play.

This year though there was an extra special surprise…

Fancy a pizza?

A pizza selling stormtrooper!
He’s from the Japanese Garrison of the 501st Legion apparently – what do you mean you didn’t know such a thing existed?

Well I couldn’t not get my picture taken with him could I…

Stormtrooper And I

I love the face the guy behind him is pulling – got a bit of yakitori stuck or something?

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Post tags: Ashiya, Matsuri, Star Wars, Stormtrooper

Ashiya Festival and some Wine Tasting

Silentjim — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:57:46 +0000

We’re heading into festival season now and it kicked off for us with the yearly Ashiya festival.

Unfortunately the weather was against us this year and it poured down on the Saturday so we held off going until the Sunday, when thankfully the weather had improved a bit.

Although it does have a musical stage by the river, with bands playing throughout the day including a surprisingly large amount of Country and Western groups, Ashiya festival is essentially about wandering around the food, drink and charity stalls, eating, drinking and discovering hidden gems amongst all the junk like the Attack on the Queen DVD (Japanese title) I picked up for a bargain ￥100!

Well, actually after watching it maybe it was a little overpriced but you live and learn.

Ashiya Festival

As usual there were a couple of wine stalls, so I tried some which were pretty nice but we’d just come from a wine tasting so I was pretty wined out by then.

Also met our local celebrity baker (Mr Bigot, french guy who makes great bread – he was the one twisting my arm to drink more wine actually), and also took a picture of the city mayor.
He looked like a nice enough chap.

Ashiya City Mayor

Didn’t stay too long as it was a “school night” and I had work the next day.

——————————————————-

But now, the wine tasting. Our first ever and a lot of fun it was too. We tried about 20 wines for just ￥2000　and had some cheese too. Check out my wine blog for more info.

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Post tags: Ashiya, Festivals, Matsuri, Wine

Lucky Bags!!!

Silentjim — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:17:05 +0000

At New Years shops, etc sell what are called Lucky Bags. Basically a closed bag containing who knows what, which you buy for a set price and hope to get lucky!

Similar to those bags you get at dodgy markets I guess, where the first one has something of value and all the rest have broken toasters or what not. (At least I assume that’s the scam). Anyway, these are not a scam, but like a New Years Blind Sale.

This year for the first time I bought one! In fact, I kinda bought two, but I’ll explain that later. The bags range from, I guess, 1000Yen up to 100,000Y or more in boutiques in Ginza, Tokyo, etc where you might find gold jewellery or something inside.

Well, we were wandering around the Ebisu festival in Nishinomiya the other week, and as well as all the food stalls they also have lots of game type things, like a fun fair in England. Darts, catching ducks, fish (live ones), lucky tickets, etc etc.

They also have these stores that have hundreds of PSP, PS3, DS games on display and lucky bag looking bags, supposedly with one of these games inside. This time (probably always), they were half price! Down to ￥500! Well, for £2 you got to haven’t you?

I scanned the bags, picked the one containing the best prize and….

My lucky bag..no DS game

eeehhh?? Where’s my Mario Kart? Will sport? anything?
A dodgy Rubiks cube (that broke as soon as I tried to move it, a piece just snapped off!) and shockingly a BB gun! The kid who bought a bag before me was probably about 6years old!

I’ve not had a BB gun before, think they’re illegal in England, but here they’re very popular and you can buy them easily. They have machine guns and all sorts. I tried it out later and managed to shoot my hand. Bloody hurt. Put that back in the box pretty quick.

Walking around a bit more, we came across an off license with Asahi Beer lucky bags! Now these were bound to be better – the guy promised us that there was at least ￥1000 (the price) of beer in there. So I tried my luck　again…

Asahi Lucky Bag

Boy did I get lucky this time!
4 cans of beer, a beer glass, a box of curry, some tissues and…some clingfilm(?!). Result!

Gonna stick to the off license lucky bags in future, but have to wait till next year now…

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Post tags: Asahi, Free Stuff, Lucky Bags, New Years

Ebisu Festival, Nishinomiya and the Big Tuna

Silentjim — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:10:20 +0000

Every year, around January 10th there’s a festival held at the Ebisu branches of shinto shrines throughout Japan (well at least I think it’s throughout I’ve only ever been to the local one in Nishinomiya).

This is a 3 day festival where thousands and thousands of people queue up at the shrine to give money and pray, and also to buy, not sure what you call them, blessed “charms”? – essentially sticks with leaves on tied up with coloured ribbons and stuff (just googled it – “talismans”, or translated from the Japanese fukusasa -
lucky bamboo grass) that are blessed by the priests and bring good luck to businesses in the coming year (as seems to be traditional with these kinds of charms talismans, you bring back the previous years one and chuckit in a big pile before queuing up for the new one).

This festival is great fun and we go every year. One of the key attractions is a big tuna donated by local businesses which people queue up to stick ￥5 coins to, again, supposed to bring good luck I think.

Big Tuna

Another big attraction is the thousands of food stalls that line the streets and back streets leading up to the shrine. Never seen so much food! Every year we tuck into turkish kebabs, yakitori (chicken on sticks), karage (deep fried chicken – pronunced with a hard ‘g’) and sake from a wooden square cup.

This year I also tried squid on a stick – which I’ve been seeing around for years but never had the courage to try…pretty tasty!

Squid on a stick

For some reason aswell, this year nearly all the food stalls were rolling their food in fried eggs – pork on a stick wrapped in egg, chicken on a stick wrapped in egg, fried noodles wrapped. Must be the new trend.
For those that don’t know, Kansai is quite famous, food wise for takoyaki – which are balls of dough with octopus in, covered in mayonnaise and a brown sauce. Delicious. But of course there’s always the problem that octopusi (? – octopuses?) are quite large so you have to cut them up into small pieces, but how big should those pieces be??

Here’s a solution…

Takoyaki

Just use tiny octopusi and stick the whole thing in! (ok, sometimes one of the legs will poke through the ball, but hey, nothing in life is perfect)

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Post tags: Ebisu, Japanese Food and Drink, Matsuri, Takoyaki, Yakitori