Otsu Festival

On Sunday, we got up and went down the street to see if any of the Ritto half marathon excitement was still going on. The tail end of the race was still coming in and we looked over to see a couple of the finished runners lighting up a smoke. Different from the typical American post race regimin. Anyway-there wasn’t much else going on, so we decided to take the train to Otsu, where we heard there was a multicultural festival. We thought this was funny because as far as we could see Japan had not seemed the least bit diverse to us. Everywhere we go people stare at us. Now I know what Jennifer Aniston must feel like. So- Otsu was a 15 minute train ride away. When we got there, we were amazed at the huge beautiful mountains surrounding the city. We followed the main street down towards the lake. This town is at the very bottom of Biwako(lake Biwa). At the Lakefront park, we found the festival. There was a band on stage playing lound music, multicultural food tents, and information about the festival. Apparently there was a man with mixed Brazilian and Japanese heritage that started the festival and now the area has a lot of people from Peru. To get to the important part of the story: one of the food tents had beef tacos and coronas. The price was the taco, some hotdog like item, and a corona for 500 yen(about 5 dollars). The tacos were awesome. The musical acts were good(one girl sang a song in Enlish). Then there was a parade. It was fine, but halfway through it, it started to down pour. Everyone retreated into the big Biwako center(it was air conditioned and had clean bathrooms). The rain stopped, so we went back out for another taco, but then it started raining again, so at the first break, we put on our rain coats and hurried back to the train station. We had a great time in Otsu.

Here is a view of Biwako across the southern most tip of the lake.

Here is a view looking back at part of Otsu.

People watching the music stage with food tents in the background.

This woman was great. She seemed like a Japanese Ani Difranco.

The band got the crowd to get up and do a fun dance together.

Dan and I enjoying ourselves.




Dan watching the parade.

A view of the mountains after the downpour.

This is the central area to the festival. There were tents all around it.

This is one of many garbage areas. Each bin is labeled with what type of garbage it is for. The first was for plastic, then glass, then cans, then the last two were burnables. The green bucket on the end has a strainer and is where you are supposed to dump any remaining liquid. It is a great system and people actually follow it. There were people maintaining these complex garbage areas throughout the day. They were never overflowing or messy looking.