Irrashaimase!

Sometimes I get Japanese phrases "stuck" in my head, like a song you somehow wake up with and repeat to yourself throughout the day. The voice is always a very high pitched Japanese woman--sometimes computerized, as it is at the ticket station or ATM. The title of this post is an example of this; it means "Welcome!" but of course is 5 syllables long. Every common phrase is at least twice as many syllables in Japanese than it is in English. What is said is thus much more valued.

Back to business. This weekend has been wonderful. Monday is a holiday ("Respect for the Aged Day") so we had an extra day to travel and experience this place more in depth. I went to the Danjiri Festival on Saturday in southern Osaka. It's a Shinto tradition where hundreds of people represent a town and each craft their own float. Men ride the float while these people pull it as fast as possible through the narrow streets. It has no steering device or brakes, thus injuries occur. Fortunately I did not witness any such thing.



It was an exciting festival, with the floats running almost every 5 or 10 minutes. We were captured by a hyper old Japanese man who called himself Marky; he took us to the information center where we met other foreigners and had our pictures taken wearing the traditional little outfits you see in the above photos.


Today, Sunday, I went to the EISA Festival--a dance and song festival--somewhere else in Osaka. Osaka is enormous, by the way. The highlight of the day was when my British friend and I were approached and invited to a booth for free food and drink. Drunk old men talked to me in Japanese for hours while I shrugged and smiled and said "Hai, hai, hai, huh?"




To close this post, I'll leave you with a really cute kid:


Awwwww.