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Okunchi
おくんち

On October 7-9 every year, Nagasaki holds a big festival called Okunchi. All the exchange
students came in on the 7th and 8th to see the festival's main attraction and do some
sight seeing, plus on the night of the 8th, I went around to see the hundreds of little
shops set up all along the streets.


Me among a crowd of people waiting for a little parade to come by.

These guys are very Japanese-looking, aren't they? I don't know what the significance of their costumes is, but they looked cool so I took a picture.

Again, I didn't really know what this was, but it looked cool and very Japanese, so I took another picture.

At the main Okunchi show, they had a bunch of these things come out a twirl around a lot. There's just one guy underneath it, and it weighs about 120kg!

Real live geisha girls! They did a big fancy dance that was pretty cool to watch.

There were a bunch of these ships, too. I remember this one as being the best, but they were all quite similar. Inside are a bunch of kids playing gongs and drumbs and cymbols and whatnot, and the guys around the outside push the ship around all over the place. When they stop, everybody shouts "Motte koi!" (Once more!), they come back in and do it again and again and again.

Before each perfomance, everybody would line up and bow to whoever was sitting at the long table on the side. I never did figure out who that guy was.

This is the group that did the Dragon Dancing. They were all lined with with the three dragons and I thought it would make a really good picture, but I was a little slow with the camera, so by the time I took the picture they were already leaving. It's blurry because the dragons are being lifted up into the air. Still, it's Dragon Dancing.

More blurry Dragon Dancing pictures. This time they're doing the actual Dragon Dance thing. At this point they're probably running around in a circle, thus the blurriness.

じゃおどり

Finally, a slightly less blurry picture. Only because the dragon isn't moving very much here. I know first-hand that this is a really annoying thing to do, because you have to hold the heavy thing up for what can sometimes seem like a really long time. But it's still fun.

A place among all the Okunchi shops on the night I went with my family.

This is me with my host brother (left) and his friend (right).

Eating Udon noodles. I just love how funny my host dad looks in the bottom left hand corner, slurping up his own udon.

A line of shops along one of the streets. You could buy all sorts of freaky things to eat. I tried at least a dozen of them!

おくんちのみせ

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