Hounen Festival

Last weekend a whole herd of ECC teachers went to a festival in a town about a 30 min. train ride away. The weather was lovely and the shrine was crowded. It was a fertility festival, so there was a parade with a giant effigy of male genitalia. I would post a picture of it, but it might up the maturity level on my blog, then you'd have to sign in saying you're 18 if you want to read it and no one wants to go down that road. Just use your imagination. It was certainly something I will never see anywhere else. There were also traditional Japanese festival things to do, like eat lots of food and catch goldfish. I tried okinomiyaki which was delicious. It's made of cabbage mostly, and has egg and a strip of pork and other tasty things like that. Usually they put mayonnaise on top, but I asked them not to. I didn't try to catch any goldfish because I was afraid they would perish under my care.

This is the man that was making the okinomiyaki.

After the parade people threw mochi (compact rice balls) from the roof of the shrine into the crowd. We were standing pretty far back and a few even came out our way. The mochi is really hard, and there have been more than a few injuries in past years. I got one though because one of my friends (who is over 6 ft. tall, so I think he had an unfair advantage over the Japanese) caught 7 of them. He gave me one.

Supposedly you can eat them. The instructions I got were to rinse it off, microwave it (to make it puff up) and then cook it in butter and soy sauce. Maybe my next day off. I don't think they go bad...

The day was a success, we ended it by eating at Coco Curry house, a Japanese curry chain restaurant. One of our group decided to get the number 10 spicy level. I got the normal amount of hotness (about a 3) and mine was spicy. He was feeling that spiciness for days.