秋まつい

This morning I woke up rather late, as is my wont on the weekends, and popped in a load of laundry. I hang most of it inside nowadays as it gets pretty chilly at night / in the early morning, and there hasn't been a lot of sun lately.

So, second load goes in, I go to the store to stock up on veggies and such. I usually pass Isobe's main shrine on my way into town. Lately it's had some construction work done - new stone steps, and some kind of big sign that wasn't unveiled until today. I wasn't aware somehow, but today and tomorrow are Isobe's Fall Festival (aki matsuri) days. Instead of a quiet, empty shrine on a hill, this is what I saw this afternoon.

The people on stage are taking turns pounding mochi, a sort of paste that's made from rice and used to make sweet cakes in the autumn. The first mochi-pounding of the season is a very special deal :3 At that point I went on my way to get foods, because I need foods to live, but I very quickly ran them back to the apartment, put on a nicer jacket and my panda-hat, and got back to the matsuri. A few of my high school students did a hip-hop dance routine towards the end of it. For some reason, hip-hop dances are VERY popular amongst younger people in Japan. Girls as young as 7 or 8 will go up on stage in baggy pants, bandanas, hoochie shirts & arm-warmers and do synchronized dance moves that their grandmothers probably wouldn't approve of. It's one of those things about Japan that I will just never understand, in the way that Japanese people will probably never fully understand why "otaku" is a label young people in America enthusiastically claim for themselves.

Anyway, clash of cultures aside, I (mostly) enjoyed the dancing. There were several very adorable groups of older women in traditional dress, doing slow and dignified autumn dances. Sorry I can't show any pictures of that; my cell phone camera is retarded for some reason and any pictures I take sideways won't un-sideways-ify themselves when I transfer them to my computer. I also saw Masako at the festival. I think she'd gone to cheer on a few of her friends who were dancing. And also for the wholesale fruit that I unfortunately failed to notice until I got back from the store. Bag-fulls of apples for 500 yen! Apples, bananas, persimmons the size of your face, you name it. Masako offered me some fruit from her bag-fulls, so now I have the most delicious first-harvest apple I have ever eaten in my tummy, and the biggest persimmon I have ever seen sitting on my kitchen counter.

The next few weeks are going to be a little hectic. AJ and I have been so spoiled with three-day weekends and half-days of classes for the past several weeks that a full week's schedule suddenly seems kinda overwhelming. But we've just gotta make it until December 4th - that's when final exams start, and thus when fall session classes end. The trimester system is awesome on the other side of the teacher's desk.