Busy Weekend
Busy! We had such a busy weekend. All the excitement started on Friday actually when I got all excited about attending Natsu Matsuri and taking Millie and Mollie out for Milo’s party. So here we shall start with the party.
Milo’s Party. Millie and Mollie were invited to attend Milo’s party on Saturday morning. There were a total of 29 four-legged friends!! I wonder if they’ve outnumbered us bipeds but maybe there was an equal number of each.
As usual Mollie jumped right in
Millie took a long while as usual but she did have a short swim
After that there was a doggy cake for the dogs and a scrumptious cake for bipeds (It was also Milo’s Daddy’s birthday). There were also loads of treats for the dogs and they went home with a goody bag each~! It’s real fun even though it started to rain for a bit later in the day. Millie and Mollie had so much fun they didn’t even want to leave even though they were tired! More photos here. (some of the photos are misty because the camera strangely became very hot and the heat formed a thin layer of mist when met with the cool exterior. But I put the photos up anyways because they are quite cute~)
NatsuMatsuri 夏祭り. E and I went to 夏祭り NatsuMatsuri in the afternoon at the Japanese School. It’s a traditional Summer Festival and it practically has everything in the Festival that we can imagine except the fireworks. We decided to go there at our own leisure since we were very fortunate to get the advance ticket from Garbo’s owner. I brought my own Yukata and E queued to see if she could rent one as well. We were really in time because she ended up getting a ticket (no. 55 I think) for a Yukata. There were limited numbers for rent so we were very pleased!! I got help from one of the very kind ladies helping with the dressing of the Yukatas and here we are dressed in traditional garb.
I wore the geta rented from the school because I left mine in the car (due to wet weather really). The ones they had for rent are very nice and were the fully wooden ones with two blocks of wood as a sole for the slipper. They seem difficult to walk in but in actual fact, I found them very comfortable. I might want to buy some like these if I EVER (-_-) go to Japan.
It was raining that day so the stalls were all indoors in the campus. We walked around and went to the food section first. We did bring our own snacks but ended up storing them in the locker. There were a lot of stalls with all kinds of food available! But in the end we just had some onigiri and konnyaku jelly. I think we were a little overwhelmed with the crowd. 
Oh and we also decided to have some beer. They were selling Asahi at a stall. But point to note, it’s not very fun drinking beer and wearing an obi. So we felt really ‘full’ after that even though it’s probably all the fizz from the beer. I think we should have found ourselves some sake instead.
Anyways we were also shopping around the stalls and found a lot of nice stuff we could buy. But we didn’t really spend until we saw the Meiji stall where we scored a bag of nice stuff each!
The pencil in the picture is actually my prize from one of the games we played. So after walking around we went to the game stalls and played some traditional games. We immediately went to the YoYo Tsuri queue to get ourselves some YoYos.
These yoyo balloons really bring back memories. I remember when I was a pre-schooler and Grandpa gave me these deflated balloons. They looked so small compared to ordinary balloons but Grandpa explained that water can be put into these little ones. It wasn’t until more than a decade later that I realized those little balloons were the yoyos commonly found in Natsu Matsuri! To play the game, all you have to do is to use a hook to hook up the balloons. However the catch is that the strings attached to the hook is made of paper so of course, it would break when it touches the water!~ Even so, some experts in the game can hook up more than one balloon~!
There were also a lot of other games such as Kingyo Sukui and Senbonbiki. But I tried my hand at Doki Doki Bowling because it sounded like loads of fun when the people are cheering you on~
Again, Bowling is a simple game. All you need to do is to roll the ball down a ramp and knock down all the pins. The ramp has a few pegs on it to obstruct the route of the ball. I played this game and hit all but one pin on the first try~ I think everyone gets 2 chances so I got another shot. But the last pin was the one on the right most corner and I couldn’t strategize a way for the ball to roll directly there. Even so I got a prize which is the pencil you see in the earlier picture! 
I guess they won’t let anyone go home empty handed!
We proceeded to the school hall later not knowing what was going on. But there were in fact performances and we were just in time! There was a traditional Taiko performance which was great since I missed the earlier one at the entrance. And there were also modern song and dance items plus an item put up by the Albirex Niigata players~! After the performance was the Bon-odori, which was the mass dance. It would have been out in the open if not for the rain but even so, the dance was rather fun!
The whole event was great and I really hope I can go again next year! More photos are here.
Mindy/Rex. We visited Mindy who is now Rex yesterday. As of now I’m trying to put up the video we took of her. (she’s too too fast to take photos!) She’s grown up so much but she’s still so little!! I know I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’m saying that she’s twice her length since we last saw her, and she still has the distinctive markings and so on. However, she’s still very small sized. I guess it would be nice if she stayed the same size Oh she has such big round eyes too! Absolutely adorable and I’m so glad she has found a good home with a big brother to play with. I’ll post the vid when it’s up ok.
Leave a Reply