Octopus and Sake- A Winning Combination

Immediately after the vicious JLPT (see the post below), some friends and I hopped on a train to the Chichibu Festival. The city of Chichibu is in my prefecture, Saitama, often known as the New Jersery of Tokyo. Saitama can be a little (okay a lot) drab and its main draw is the convenience to Tokyo. But, in Saitama's defence there are a few great hidden treasures- Chichibu being one of them. With a national park, great mountains and hiking trails, it is possibly the only really cool natural spot in metropolitan Saitama. Chichibu is thankfully not too far from me and has the 3rd largest night festival in Japan with a fireworks competition that puts American fireworks to shame. The night was frigid but with some hot amazake (sweet rice sake) I was nice and toasty. It was just what the doctor ordered- a relaxing, fun evening after weeks of diligent study for the test.



One of the best parts of the Japanese Matsuri? The matsuri food of course! With yummy oden (hot soup), yaki tori(grilled chicken skewers), and yakisoba(pan-fried noodles) among other favorites it's always hard to decide what to eat. Above is a pic of hundreds of pink, frozen mini octopi (is that the correct plural?!) waiting to be made into delicious tako yaki, a batter cooked with octopus in the center. Might sound gross but it's delish, I promise.


Jess, George and Ian enjoying the hot sake. They look like they are having fun because they were! George and Jess got to the festival at 4 and you can take a guess at what time it is from the pitch black sky. Some good solid drinking at any Japanese matsuri is a must! (I swear, I only had 1 cup!)



Here's a pic of Mark and I chilling around the cardboard streetfire we found. Some young Japanese guys were sitting around after pulling the mikoshi (the portable shrines used earlier in the festival for a kind of parade) burning up cardboard and selling sweet amazake. So, we parked it on the side of the street and chatting with these guys for a good half hour while we enjoyed the heat from the fire.



In the end, the guy sitting on my right gave me a little gift, the headwrap you can see me proudly displaying with our newfound friends. They were cool dudes. And I got a rad omiyage!

Loved the Chichibu Matsuri. Glad I went- it was the best thing I could have done after a long Sunday morning taking a test. If I'm still in Japan next year, you can believe I will be back for more wintertime festival fun, Japanese style.