Nanbu Fireworks Festival

I temporarily fired Robert from blogging...

He doesn't know that yet...

Oh, yes, I know, he writes funny blog posts. No denying there. But I'll tell you a secret.

HE TAKES FOREVER TO WRITE ONE STORY!

I am more of a mass producer of posts--you know, for family memories recording and for kids to read someday. He thinks of each story as his masterpiece, and maybe that's because I always beg him to write since his posts are so fun to read.

Anyway, since we are just a "little bit" busier this next week than usual, I have to finish a few blog posts and have no time to wait for Robert:)

If it were their choice, our kids would do two things all summer summer long here. They would play outside 90% of the time and then they would do this the rest of the time:

That's our "baby Mark" playing Wii Mario Karts. Hahaha:) The kids love it when he gets 10th or 11th place:) It's been only a month since he figured out how to actually drive the cars and he's been having lots of fun. Notice our tiny Japanese TV. It's going back on the curb this Tuesday for bulk trash pick up.

Okay, so one of the last minute trips we took a week ago was a trip to Nanbu town. Nanbu was having a Fireworks Festival for two days. We went on Saturday afternoon. Originally, we were planning to go to Towada Fireworks Festival near lake Towada, but after hearing all the stories about how late it finishes (around 9:30 pm) and how long it takes to get out from the area via Oirase Gorge road (it would take over two hours to get home, for sure), we decided we should stick closer to home. Our new friends, the R family decided to come along.

We arrived to the festival around 6 pm. Although we don't speak Japanese, it was very easy to find where festival parking was and easy to find where festival food was.

Japanese festival food... It's almost always the same. We have our favorites and foods that make us gag (like that black brick of jello that we bought in Hirosaki a couple of years ago-haha). We were much more frivolous with spending money this time since we knew this might be our last real festival experience here. We got yakitori chicken and rice balls and balls made of octopus and some pork and some scallops on a stick and some bean buns (or something like that) and some chubby hot dogs and even let our kids get sodas:)

Here is mama (yes, it's me) devouring scallops. Each scallop piece was 100 yen (over $1).

After we figured out what we wanted to eat, we had to scout for a place to sit down and eat our dinner. The place was packed, but we managed to squeeze in our blankets between other Japanese.  

Mark enjoying his grape Fanta.

And here is an an attempt to get a family picture. That Japanese old guy sitting behind us was so funny! He just loved "talking" to Mark. Somehow, I looked away and a moment later saw that Japanese guy sharing his rice meal with Mark. No kidding. Mark just kept nodding "domo arigato" and I was trying to ask the guy if there was any SAKE in that rice (when I was deciding what to buy for my dinner, I was asking vendors what is inside rice balls and one of them said they had sake taste to them). Do not worry, rice meal turned out to be non-alcoholic.

"Our parents are great! They let us eat all this weird food just because we are at the festival!"

We were also laughing a bit that the Japanese family behind us had practically its whole living room out there set up as a picnic. I mean, they had some serious meals cooking and multi-course dinner served. Most people had lots of yummy food to munch on while watching the fireworks.

It got dark by 7:30 pm. Fireworks were supposed to begin at 8:15 pm, so we had just a few minutes to explore. Kids found some playground equipment. And we found some colorful "flowery" ice cream. It was good, don't trust our facial expressions.

Katya got her most coveted dessert ever! A big apple covered with sticky candy coating.  

A note about bathrooms at this place. After a ten minute wait to the ladies' bathroom, we got our turn. To our surprise....they were squatty potties! No not really, we were not surprised. What we were surprised about was finding four empty cardboard toilet paper tubes on the floor in the bathroom and no toilet paper. And no soap or normal sink for that matter. This was probably the most disgusting bathroom I have encountered in Japan (and it brought back a few fun memories of toilets in Ukraine).

All right, I cannot finish on such a negative note:) The fireworks were great! Everyone just sat and "oohed and aahed" over some of them in a very Japanese manner. Sometimes people clapped. This was the only fireworks we got to see this year since the base did not do any fireworks for Independence Day. And we sure glad we went. Kids absolutely loved it! I know this is the part where we are supposed to show you pictures of these fabulous fireworks, but, unfortunately, our camera does not take good fireworks pictures...so I must end at this. Again, sorry.

Coming home did not take long at all. Kids were all asleep by the time we got home:)

I must go to bed now. We begin our last full week in Misawa. And we have lots to do.

Sayonara for now.