Tanabata Festival in Misawa

In three years, this was the first time that the Watsons got a chance to see Tanabata Festival outside the base gate in Misawa. Can you believe it? For some reason, we have always gone camping for the past two summers on these particular festival days.

This year, since we were already moved out of our house and were living at the base hotel, we couldn’t think of anything better to do than going to the festival to hang out with our friends (and get some evening relief from the insane heat of the hotel rooms…).

Every year, on the last full weekend of July, vendors of Misawa get together for a “State Fair-like” event, at least food wise. The famous White Pole Road is decorated with bamboo poles with streamers and Paper Mache hanging down for people to walk through. You can read this  beautiful legend about Tanabata’s origin to learn the  meaning of the decorations. Here is a picture of Mark literally riding through the streamers.

We had a great time trying all sorts of different foods as well as getting some of our favorites. I had okonomiyaki one last time trying to figure out why our kids loved it so much at their summer Japanese culture class. Okonomiyaki is a pancake with a mixture of whatever veggies you want inside. This particular one I had was cooked with eggs and cabbage. I think it had some squid in it it too. It was all right. Alex got balls made of octopus, of course. Katya decided to have some Indian curry.

  

As you can see Katya and Alex wanted to wear their Yukatas, traditional Japanese summer festival clothes. I believe it cased them to behave even goofier than usual.

After getting some good food we walked for a while through most of the streamers and lanterns.

Managed to snap a couple of last family pictures in Misawa. By this time, Alex was done with wearing a long “dress” since he was sweating profusely. Although the temps cooled down for the evening, it was still in the lower 80s with high humidity.

Kids loved this one of Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Skytree and the Eiffel Tower.

This one was my favorite. Japan and the UK. AND, if you want to be cheesy, you can say that the beehive looking thing on the left represents Ukrainian colors-haha.

All right, one last family picture at the festival.

So glad we went! Fun festival, but being with great friends made it just so much better.

We already miss you, Misawa!