Kawagoe

Oct 25th 2007
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Last weekend I went to Kawagoe, or as everyone know it “Little Edo”, literally translated means River(kawa) Over(goe). I went there to see a friends new house and to explore the yearly festival.

This festival is held on the 3rd Saturday and Sunday in October. With the old fashioned “kurazukuri” style buildings and the town of “Little Edo” for a background, floats weighing up to 7.5tonnes parade in the city with “Edo-bayashi”, a traditional music.Bands compete with each other, which is called “hikkawase” and is the climax of the parade. As usual plenty of food drink and fun exploring this cute town that has held onto it’s Edo period look and feel. The town is surrounded by rivers hence the name and there is quite a lot to see. Well worth the 30 minutes north of Tokyo. The festival is very interesting were many “Floats” travel the streets under hand power and have a music and stage show on each one, as two floats come together the “Battle” it out and try to persuade each other to follow there tune. The streets a lined with all the usual stall but one in particular to my fancy, Sasebo-Burger! I resisted the temptation of getting one but boy they looked great.I also had Sake in a very peculiar way, drinking from a standard square wooden sake cup but with salt around the edge, kind of like a sake shot. Very tasty but not exactly what I needed after a big night on Friday. This coming weekend I will go to another very famous area called Nikko, a world heritage area I believe and they have monkeys that take hot baths or as we know it in Japan an Onsen..looking forward to seeing some crazy monkeys wreaking havoc on unsuspecting tourists! Be sure to stop back and see what I hope are some great photos. Tomorrow is also the launch of Mac OS X Leopard, could be a busy Friday night, or hopefully everything goes smooth and I can report just how great the new OS X Leopard is.