Towada Lake Festival

Towada is a town about 45 minutes away from where I live by car. Towada lake is an amazingly beautiful lake that's named after the town. The town and the lake are no where near each other. Towada lake is about an hour and 15 minutes away from where I live... in the other direction from where the town of Towada is. Welcome to Japan.

In any case, as I mentioned in the last post, Laura took me to a festival that happened to be at Towada lake about 2-3 weeks ago. It's an interesting festival in that it's actually a combination of three other really famous festivals in Aomori prefecture (prefectures are like states... so Aomori = Arizona in my new address :P ) It was a 'Previously on....' festival basically. It was still lots of fun though, and I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately most of my pictures didn't come out that well from it, but I still have a few worth showing. Most of them are of the shrine near Lake Towada though... but they are still cool! The problem was most of the festival was at night, and I didn't have my actual camera with me, just my cell phone. My cell phone apparently does not like taking pictures at night... But oh well. Let's begin! First of all, the picture at the top of the post is where you wash your hands and mouth before you go to the shrine to pray.


This is the actual shrine itself, complete with actual praying people!

A little side shrine off to the side of the main shrine.

Another little side shrine.

I wish I had pictures of the lake, but for some reason I was so impressed with how pretty it was that I totally spaced on taking pictures of it... I fail. It's alright though, I promise I'll take some in October, since it's apparently one of the best places in Aomori to go for fall and see the leaves change color.

These next two pictures are the only pictures that came out somewhat decently of the festival itself. This was actually the last part of the festival, and it was totally worth going just to see these guys. They take a pole with tons of lanterns attached to it, hike it up into the air, and then balance it on various parts of their body without letting it fall.

For example, this guy is balancing it on his hip. Why? Because he can.

They would do all these amazing things where they would run at the audience with them, and you would think that it was going to crash into you, but they were still balancing them fine. There were three of them, and at the finale they started running at each other and crashing into each other, and yet they still didn't let the lanterns fall. It was really amazing.


Sorry about the cruddy pictures this post, I promise next time I know I'm going somewhere cool, I'll take my actual camera with me. These aren't too bad for cell phone pictures though... oh well. :) I'll update again soon! I think I'm almost caught up! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel...