Misawa Air Show

Misawa is an American military base near here, maybe about 45 minutes away by car. It's not nearly as big as the one in Okinawa, but then again, it also seems to be tolerated better by the locals than the Okinawan air force base too, which the locals down there are currently trying to kick out of the country.... In any case, the base had an airshow about three weeks ago, which I went to with a bunch of other JETs. It was on the weekend before Aaron came out here, and it was pretty fun. I saw the Blue Angels once a long time ago though, so I'd seen stuff like this before. I was mostly interested in going so I could get some American food, which at this point I'm starting to miss pretty badly. I managed to get some Pizza Hut and some Popeye's chicken, which were both much more delicious than they had any right to be. I wanted to get Burger King, but there was an hour long wait for it... and I was hungry.



They had lots of neat airplanes on display, which were fun to see. That's Chloe, another JET posing charmingly in front of that last airplane. Again, Tucson having one of the largest air force bases in the country, and the plane graveyard, kind of made me immune to these things unfortunately.

If you didn't gather it from my earlier comment about there being an hour wait for a Burger King hamburger: there were tons and tons of people there. Tons. Millions. Billions. Not really, but there were a lot, and unfortunately the pictures above don't really convey the sheer amount of people there. It was pretty amusing to watch the sea of cameras come floating up above the crowd every time a plane flew by. :)

My favorite part of the day, absolutely, hands down, all began when Brian (another ALT) picked up Chloe for some random reason (the girl ALT pictured earlier) and started swinging her around at us. A bunch of elderly Japanese people saw this, thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and then proceeded to ask Brian to lift all of them. So Brian did. This picture is unfortunately just a little post-pickup, and I missed pictures of everything else after that. What happened after this picture was that after Brian picked up the elderly men, they decided that they wanted to try to lift him. Neither of the two men could do it by themselves, so they teamed up together in order to carry Brian around for a bit. Everyone was laughing hysterically, both American people and Japanese, and it was absolutely the most fun I had that day.

The last video here is pretty short, and I didn't get the best shot, but it's of two of the planes flying at each other and missing at the last second. It's pretty cool to see, sorry it didn't turn out better, but hey.... those planes are freaking fast!