Takefu Obon

Rob and I danced in the Obon festival in Takefu. Obon is a holiday where people spend time with their family and return to their hometown to visit/tend to the graves of their ancestors. People believe that thier ancestors come back and visit them during this holiday. At the end of Obon they go back to their spirit land for another year. umm that's all about spiritual stuff. One of the big activities during Obon is dancing. People line up in a parade like fashion and dance in a ritualized manner to 4 different traditional Japanese songs. All the movements are coordinated and everyone knows them. Probably this was a skill they've had from conception.

The International Association in Takefun invited all of the JETs to dance with their group. It seemed like all of the town was there at the parade, but most were dancing, and few were watching. That was good since we were pretty much horrible at it. Here's some ALTs in our pre-dancing haze.

This is the float that followed behind our group. It is two hands - multi-racial hands clasped together in sharing or caring or who knows. I don't really know if I have words to describe my feelings about it.

Camping in Ono

This weekend we went camping near Ono city. It was nice to get away from our apartment and to the outdoors overnight. This place is beautiful. The pictures don't even do it justice, but what can you do???

The water was amazingly clear. Also really cold (frigid compared to the lakes of East Texas) I think because it comes from the mountains where snow is melting.

TIME club

We have been really busy lately... going to festivals, dancing in Obon parade, meeting new people, camping, watch fireworks. Tons of stuff. For now I will put up a picutre of TIME club. It's a group of people we meet with every week. We talk about the editorial in Time magazine. It's a really fun group because we get to have indepth conversations with Japanese people in English. Which is something I really enjoy because my Japanese isn't good enough yet to talk about politics or traveling. This picture was taken at our summer dinner party.