Dancing, Drumming @ Our Festival Part One

Our Town's (Ofunato) summer festival Part One:
Dancing and Drumming...

Video: Sumita 3-Year Festival

Yesterday we "went back home" to Sumita for a very special festival that is held once every three years. Gabe and I lived in Sumita for three years and often miss the wonderful friends and neighbors in that beautiful little town. We were so happy to see so many of them. I made this video from the videos and pictures we took:

Videos: Ofunato 5-Year Fest & Picnic

We had a really nice day today. Here are some videos of what we did.

Video of Ofunato 5-Year Festival Highlights (about 3 min.):


Video of the picnic we had afterwards:

Actually, this style of hand made sushi "Temaki-zushi (手巻き寿司)" was taught to us by our friends. It's a real casual way of eating sushi and our favorite because you can customize the flavor to suit your taste.

Girl's Day

In Japan, March 3rd is Girl's Day ( 雛祭り, Hina-matsuri)
Here is a picture of Steph from one year ago. This was taken at the Setamai Kindergarten where Steph has been a volunteer guest teacher for 3 years.

Steph wrote a really nice post last year about it.
Click here and check it out.

And...

Golden Week Day 6

Here are some pics from Day 6 of Golden week. I can't believe this was a month ago already! Time sure does fly! We went to Tono this day to see Mark and his Samurai group at a festival. Unfortunately we were too late and missed his show but we did get to see him in in armor! It was really cool.






Next we watched some traditional dancing. This one in particular was a deer dance. They were playing drums and flutes I believe. There are some amazing similarities between the old Japanese music and dance and Native American music and dance. We really enjoyed sitting and taking it all in.

Then we walked up the mountainside and found this lookout point. It was beautiful. We could see a perfect view of Tono city. The sky was clear and blue and the cherry blossoms were just starting to bloom there. It is a little colder in Tono (which is about 45 minutes from our town) so their blossoms bloom later.

After our day in Tono we went to have dinner with our friend Mutsuko and her family at their house. She prepared Sukiyaki for us. It was so delicious!
Everyday was like a dream!