Saturday, October 23, 2004
Kujiradon Festival
Today we went to the Whale and Udon Festival in Arikawa. We got to try whale meat (but all the weirdest parts so it wasn’t very good) and ate udon soup. In fact, I sent a package of udon and it’s flying fish soup home with Daniel so my family will be able to try it soon too!
The festivities!
Making udon by hand!
Whale meat. It’s really expensive.
The highlight of this festival is watching the small kids in the town put on raingear and jump into a large pool of water and try to catch fish with their bare hands. The fish they catch are killed right in front of them and shoved into a plastic bag to be taken home for dinner. There’s some controversy among ALTs (well, mostly Peter, I think) about this festival. I’m not going to get into that because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it myself, but I thought I should as least mention it unless you’re thinking it’s terribly inhumane or something.
The kids lining up for a chance to catch fish.
Children catching fish in the pool.
The “before” picture. I’ll spare the vegans and vegetarians the “after” picture. But if you’re going to eat meat, you know the animal has to die before you eat it. This is actually a quick death.
Restocking the pool.
We left the festival around 1 p.m. when it was getting quite warm and we felt like we’d seen all we needed to see. The smell of our whale organs (or whatever they were) were kind of getting to us. Yuka, you were a great host—thank you for having us! We carefully got back on our bikes for our trek back to Aokata. Asagami had agreed to meet us at AquaBlue with his van and drive us and our bikes back to Narao. My butt was just in too bad a shape to make the 30 kilometers back. Asagami is a saint for coming to picking us up!!
We also met some students from Wakamatsu Junior High School in AqueBlue and they asked us to do purikura with them. Purikura are those small colorful stickers with your picture and designs on them. I had wanted to do purikura with DT in Nagasaki, but honestly it’s so complicated we couldn’t figure it out! With these girls help we were able to get our stickers after all!
Four different designs.
And, as I said, it was just one party after the next. On Sunday night we invited Asagami, the Hatakeyama’s, and Koichiro over for dinner at our house. It was a small goodbye dinner for Daniel’s last night in Narao. We put together a random bunch of things: pasta, cold corn and bean salad, sopias (those open Spanish tacos with refried beans and cheese), nuts and dried fruit, cake, and edamame of course! Asagami also ordered a platter of sushi and sashimi and so we had plenty of food.
I can’t believe he’s leaving tomorrow! I will miss you so much DT!!!
Love, Sierra
