Afternoon and onigiri

More mikoshi..........

Mikoshi

This past weekend I had the good fortune of attending a mikoshi, a shinto festival where the worshippers carry a shrine through the streets, and up to the temple. Everyone dresses in special festival garb (aka hapi coats and loin cloths) and makes quite a ruckus. Shinto festivals are usually lively and colourful, the main objective being to entertain the gods, which often involves the consumption of a lot of sake. A friend of mine was taking part in the shrine carrying, and had invited O and I along.
After he had finished, we met up with him, and wandered around the neighbourhood, it being his hometown. It was a pleasant change from the chaos of Shibuya, and we wandered the quiet green streets slowly. It was a blistering 30 degrees, and our lack of sleep and dehydration (from the previous night of partying)really began to catch up with us!
Randomly and fortunately, the way most things here in Tokyo happen, we came across the Sunday children's unicycle club, and a giant mushroom pavillion. Just a few more Japanese surprises to brighten the day, and keep us wondering.......

Izu continued.....

Izu Adventuring!

Our trip to Izu was essential! Izu is a beautiful penninsula located south of Tokyo by a couple hours. Our destination was Shimoda, a small town near the southern-most tip of Izu, boasting gorgeous beaches and few tourists. I think we were nearly the only gaijin we saw the whole weekend! The beach was a lovely stretch of white sand and crashing warm waves. Pretty packed in the day time, but near sun-down it was almost deserted. We stayed in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese style inn) in the winding backstreets of the town. It was so refreshing to be outside the madness of Tokyo, and experience a little bit of the laid-back Japanese culture of the country side.

We just stayed over night, and then headed across to the west side of the penninsula, to the quiet town of Matsuzaki, where we checked out this funky little beach that looked like an Italian lagoon! Very quaint and HOT! We floated lazily in inner tubes until we were captured by a rowboat crewed by two junior high school Japanese pirates (claiming their identities to be Captain Jack Sparrow and Orlando Bloom! ha ha ha!) The area around Matsuzaki was beautiful and lush with jungle-like foliage and rice fields. That night we stayed in a lovely youth hostel in the middle of nowhere! The stars where amazing and the cool breeze was a relief from the stifling city heat!

We headed out early the next morning for Dogashima. There we hiked up and down the coastline, looking out at the impressive cliffs that rose out of the middle of the ocean. It seemed like everywhere we went, Japan was constantly shrouded in a mysterious curtain of mist! After our wandering, we headed further north up the coast to a small town called Toi and ate the best maguro sushi yet! After a lazy day sunning ourselves on the beach one last time, we climbed aboard yet another bus and headed back for T-town, leaving a luxurious weekend of leisure behind us.