another one of our last minute adventures. we knew we had some time to go somewhere but weren’t sure where to go…tickets to europe were out of control because of the olympics and we found out that japan wasn’t as expensive as we expected it to be, and we’d both always wanted to go there so off we went.
we went in august which is a time of year that they have a lot of celebrations so we tried to go around and find places where we’d be able to see some neat things. first stop, sendai! many of the celebrations in august have to do with the dead, specifically tanabata festival. it’s a long story but in short the stars align and they are able to commune with their dead ancestors, but bad spirits are allowed to come too during this time so there are lots of ghost stories. they make a bunch of things out of paper to put out their wishes to the dead. all these beautiful hanging streamers must have taken an  incredible amount of time to make! they were so cool!
we really wanted to be in hiroshima on the 6th but it didn’t work out that way, it would have been cool to see the floating lanterns in celebration.
jared was REALLY grossed out that i got this but it was soooo good!
japanese love their malls and there are enclosed shopping malls like this everywhere!
they also seemed to be shooting news or tv shows in every town we were in, so we made sure to walk in the backround of each one, hopefully we made some japanese TV!!
yup, makes sense…
that’s MISTER donut to you!
people in japan also love everything that is cute…and there is a lot of cute in japan 🙂
people can write their wishes on slips of paper.
there were lots of mocktography opportunities this trip 😉
see, cute! he dyed his dogs’ tails…cute or weird…not sure.
there aren’t a lot of gringos (err gaijins) in sendai so we’re not sure if they were having everyone do this or if we got made fun of a little…we still don’t know what this was all for but they made us put on these robes and pose for a picture. random!!
yep…err what?
soda…water…beer…just a normal vending machine.
and then we were off to our next spot on the bullet trains, stay tuned for more!
