Two Posts on the same day...

Today I made oinari-san--my absolute favorite Japanese food--for the first time. It's rice (or carrot rice, in our case) stuffed inside deep-fried tofu. Yum! If I still remember how when I get back to the states, ask me and I'll be happy to make some for you, too!

• Left: Here are some of the ingredients. You can see more of the finished product in the bottom right corner.
• Right: Hiroko said they were delicious. Since she's a professional cook, I'll take that as a pretty big compliment!

...Twice the fun.

The annual summer festival ("matsuri") in my city, Haneda, took place this past weekend. I'm also experimenting with putting video on this blog for the first time, so feel free to leave comments.

This is video of the locals carrying a portable shrine, or "mikoshi". They bring it all through their neighborhood and eventually end up at the main shrine building which is just a couple minutes walk from my house. This particular mikoshi is for a neighborhood in Haneda called Nishimachi, which was my host mother's birthplace. Every once in a while during the procession, they stop walking and start shouting and then shaking the mikoshi. I'm not exactly sure what it means, but I was pretty amazed at how much they can shake it--these things are incredibly heavy. Watch how it pulls them right off the ground when their side is in the air. My favorite part is at the end when one of the guys in the blue "hapi" (traditional clothes) does a little bit of a tip-toe dance for no apparent reason...



And here are a few other photos from that same night:

• Left: Hiroko and Laura waiting for our yakisoba to be cooked. This was officially the sweatiest man I saw all evening. Delicious food, though. :)
• Right: Lots of people came for this festival. Even people who grew up here but now live somewhere else will come back to town for this event. You can see the main shrine, Haneda Jinja, in the background. This is the same shrine that Hiroko's sister, Yoshiko, took me to for New Years'.

• Left: Hiroko's daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren came back as well for the evening. This is a photo of the youngest grandaughter, Cocona, with "Uncle Yota" (my host brother). Cocona is about 18 months.
• Right: this is Cocona's 4-year old sister, Yuria, showing off her new toy from grandma.

• Left: Heather joined us towards the end of the evening. Here's the three of us eating "choco-bananas", which are pretty much incredible. You can always find a booth selling them at local festivals in the summertime, but this is the first time I actually tried one.
• Right: this is what the streets of Haneda looked like at night. Pretty nice to look at on the walk home.
  

Kamakura in the summer...

...is not really that much different than any other time of the year, but still one of my most favorite places to visit.

• Left: Lots of sunshine + heat and humidity + me = sunscreen and lots of water.
  
• Right: This time, I took Heather to the same bamboo forest that Laura and I went to on my first visit to Kamakura.
  

• Left: back to the buddha!
  
• Right: this is a pond at Hasedera Temple, just down the street from the big Buddha. Notice its shape. No, you need not worry about any fascist dictators in this country. This shape has actually been a "good luck" symbol in Buddhism for a couple thousand years.
  

• Left: near the same pond were these tiny little statues. Actually, there were probably a few hundred of them. I'm not sure what they represent, but I thought they looked pretty cool in the picture. I'm such a tourist.
  
• Right: You can see the real size of these statues in this picture (they're along the wall just above where Heather was lighting some incense).
  

• Left: Cute!
  
• Right: A view of Kamakura city from the viewpoint at Hasedera.
  

It's been more than a month! Sorry...

Here's (hopefully) enough photos to make up for these last few weeks of non-posting.

• Left: The last week of June, my friend Laura moved into the extra bedroom at the house where I am doing a homestay. I and another former coworker of mine, Kraavor, went to help out. In this picture, we're just getting ready to leave her old house. This was only half of her stuff. :)
• Right: Then, a few days after that, we had a sayonara-party for our friend Kim who returned to Canada at the beginning of July. This is one last shot of the three of us together. Kim was my first roommate in Japan, and a pretty spectacular one at that.

• Left: Guess which one of us has a broken foot? It's Laura! This is what the shoes look like near our front door and I thought how sad her one shoe looked, there all by itself while all of the others had mates. So I took a picture.
• Right: Laura's friend and I bought her the "Handicapped" sign at the local 100 yen store (the equivalent to a dollar store).

• Left: about two weeks ago, Laura's friend Heather came for a visit from Scotland. Laura's got a broken foot (see above) and shouldn't walk a lot, so Laura and I took turns bringing Heather to places around Tokyo. This photo is at Asakusa Kannon-do (Sensoji) where they were having a festival. I finally went to this ice cream place I'd always meant to try--they have something like 32 flavors. Everything from wasabi (horseradish) to lavender and anything in between. I tried the sweet potato, and yes, it tastes like sweet potato.
• Right: from the temple, we took the ferry ride back to Hamamatsucho where we took the train home.

• Left: Went to Chinatown once again. The gate in the background is at the entrance to one of the shrines.
• Right: Also in Chinatown, we found these handy instructions on how to use a toilet. I can honestly say that I genuinely did learn how *NOT* to use a toilet...
  

Ok, I guess that's about it for now. I have lots more to share, but will save them for the next post!