Fujiyoshida Fire Festival (himatsuri)
Fujiyoshida Craft Park
Shimobe Yamame matsuri

This was a great weekend. I drove to Kofu for the first time to pick up Meriel and Marisa, and the three of us heading to Fuji Yoshida to see the famous fire festival on Friday. Unfortunately, we got there at 10:30pm so we only had an hour-and-a-half of fire festival time, or so, but it was still good fun. The streets in the center of town were all blocked off, and they had these HUGE torches of fire every 15 feet or so. It would have been great to see them lit! I ate too much festival food (takoyaki - soso, squid-on-a-stick - blech!, yakisoba - good, popcorn chicken - good, chocolate-covered-banana-on-a-stick - good) and felt sick later. Anyone noticing a food-on-a-stick theme? They like that. We had chicken skewers too.

Stuffed and happy, we came back to Hayakawa and crashed at my apartment. The next day we headed into Minobu so I could show them manju, the local Minobu dessert treat. So good! A little bean cake thingie. yum yum yum! We ate lunch at a noodle place and watched the resident hawks circle over the Fujikawa river. We stopped in at Kuonji again, but didn't make it past the ice cream stand at the bottom of the street leading up to the temple, so all we got were pictures of the little shrine outside the big gate and before the stairs. We woke up really late, so we decided to go to the Fujikawa craft park and see what was up. We ended up having a blast. The "craft park" is a craft park because you can do glass blowing, pottery, paper-making, etc. We just watched, then wandered the grounds and enjoyed the view. We also got a little crazy and took over all the playground equipment and relived our elementary school days.

It was late again, so we had dinner at a local noodle place (this will be a recurring theme) and crashed once more at my house. I drove the girls back the next day, but not before stopping to cool our feet off at the beautiful Amehata (Amehata is part of Hayakawa, remember?) waterfall. See those pictures in the Amehata section of Hayakawa.

Oh, and I almost forgot the Shimobe yamame matsuri! It's crazy! shimobe is part of Minobu now, and has a famous onsen. We heard there was a weird festival so we went to check it out on Sunday. Basically, they block off a section of the river with stones from the river, and have kids (and a few adults) jump around in the pools created trying to catch river trout with their hands! We got there late, again, but there were still tons of kids in the pools. Just not much fish. People took the fish to a cleaning station, gutted and cleaned and salted the fish right there (!!!) and then had their own, fresh-caught and hand-made fish-on-a-stick! We passed on the gut-your-own experience and bought f.o.a.s. and yakisoba instead. Still, it was good fun, and we chatted up some people advertising wine from a local winery. The son had gotten married in Hawaii and they gave us a free half-bottle of wine. I passed, as I was driving, but Meriel and Marisa drank the whole thing. They're so tiny, too!