Pictures from the Weekend
Let’s see. It was my work friend Matt’s last night of drinking before he becomes a poppa last Friday. So I ended up pretty wasted (naturally) and even after Matt had gone, continued drinking with Andrew and his friend Mike. The booze (among other things… but mainly the booze) having made us all emotional we sat by the Kamogawa watching the fireflies (pretty amazing up by Demachiyanagi this time of year) and telling each other mutually appreciative things… I eventually got home at 4 – which was unfortunate as I had the clinic at ten. But I made it on time and it was a good session too…
Saturday was funny. Spent most of the afternoon wrestling with Mewby’s dog Rui (actually… not that hard to do… seeing as she’s a Maltese). Leaving Mewby’s place we passed Tofukuji so I took a picture.
Then in the evening we met up with Ted and Miki and her brother and sister-in-law (“yome desu!”) at Shimogamo. We had heard there was a fire-fly festival and that 500 of our wee glowing bretheren would be released at the stream. There was a large crowd waiting around the stream at the front of the shrine, staring intently at the waters so we waited there and stared intently too… and the minutes ticked by and nothing happened… till suddenly everyone just upped and left. It seemed there was another stream inside the shrine and that was where all the action had happened and we’d missed it already. However, although I had images of hundreds of the poor wee twinkly beasties being released all in one glowing go (and Ted had had Larsen-esque images of them all being instantly caught in a giant spider web) it appears they were all released boringly one-by-one. No show-manship these people. They like to dress up though.
I don’t know what this lady was doing but lots of people were watching her very intently so I’m sure it was very cultural and important.
Later though going home by the river, Mewby kept stopping and insistently shouting “Look! Look! There’s another one! Look! LOOOK!” very excitedly because there so many fireflies out among the river grasses… Very exciting, fireflies. If you get the chance – get yourself up to Demachiyanagi and watch them floating about. It’s like watching fairies. It really is.
