Cherry Blossom Festival

Sunday, we headed to Nago to see the Cherry Blossom Festival. Yea for us, since we usually try to avoid crowds at all cost and this time we were purposefully driving toward them. Of course we got lost, of course the directions we were following were extremely vague and of course we saw another American and decided to follow them. Ends up, they had pretty much the same crappy directions we had and ended up following us. Bad idea. We finally just found a parking lot in the area we thought it had to be and walked. We were pretty close. We were just in time to see the parade. We found a nice empty spot in the warm sun and sat down to enjoy the festivities. I haven't been to a parade in America in forever, but if the short one we saw at Christmas on the Air Force base is any indication, the Americans love giving out candy. The Japanese gave out little tiny oranges. How refreshing (esp. considering how expensive fruit is around here). One of the first groups that passed us handed Mary an orange and she held on to that for the longest time. She loved smelling it and then shoving, I mean, gently putting it up to our noses to smell. So cute. Near the end, a man handed us a handful of oranges, so we decided to join in with all the other on lookers and eat them. Yum. Tart, sweet and perfect. Didn't get any pics of Mary eating them, but she was gobbling them down as fast as Doug could de-seed them. Unfortunately, by the time the parade was over, we only had time to get a beer and a snack (and a much needed bathroom break for me) that we didn't walk far enough down the street to see the cherry blossoms. Funny, since that's why we went. We did see some beautiful trees in the distance as we were sitting in traffic on the way home. Overall, a good day. Next year we'll check out the trees. (ps. the pic of the trees at the top of the page was a part of the parade. They were fake tree branches on a truck. Still pretty)

A Shisa dog in the parade. They walked around with a bunch of drummers who stopped right in front of us for a show. It was great...and loud. I was so mesmerized by the show that the dog sat down right next to me on the sidewalk. I didn't even notice him. I glanced to my left and shrieked. Everyone had a nice chuckle.

One of my favorite pics. Mary holding her orange. Doug said it's crooked. I thought it was cool.

Watching the show.