I wish you all could have checked out the festival I went to on Saturday night! It was positively magical.

Danielle recommended that we go to the Tatsuno Firefly Festival, after enjoying it last year. Saturday afternoon, Jaclyn and I decided that we wanted to try to go in our yukatas (summer kimonos). We called our Shodo teacher, who in turn called one of her friends... who agreed to dress us (there is NO WAY I can tie the obi-waistband-myself). We looked like little Japanese dolls- until you looked at our faces, anyhow. Tatsuno is about an hour from Misato so we had to drive the whole way there sitting straight up so as to not mess up our bows. It was exhausting.

When we got there, at first we didn't see anyone else dressed up so we were really worried. I felt like I was walking around in my pajamas or something. When we got to the actual street the festival was on, there were many other girls and couples dressed up, though. We were greatly relieved!!

The first section of street looked like any other Japanese festival- brightly colored booths selling food (yakisoba, yakitori, beef/chicken on sticks, takoyaki, crepes, cotton candy...), balloons, and even goldfish (catch your own!). We watched a little girl dump *almost* all the water out of her poor goldfish's bag- I wonder if the fish made it home!

We kept walking the direction everyone else seemed to be going. Finally, the booths peetered out and we walked down a tiny lane passing through a quiet neighborhood. There were some dim festival lanterns hanging on one side of the street. We followed this street for a couple of blocks until we went down a hill and were on a path wandering through some fields. The lanterns stopped and there were no lights at all. If I hadn't have been surrounded by hundreds of other festival-goers I would definitely have thought I'd taken a wrong turn. We continued walking, and started to hear group "ah!!!"s as there were random firefly sightings. There were little kids trying to catch the poor bugs and men futily attempting to take pictures of the fireflies with cell-phones. We walked up a small hill and looked back into the field. Our eyes had adjusted and we started to see tons of fireflies!! In one spot- there were so many it looked like we were looking up into the sky- instead of down at the ground. We just stood there watching- it was just such a unique moment to be dressed in yukata, standing out in the pitch black summer night with hundreds of people and thousands of fireflies!

It was one of those times when I truly feel that I Am In Japan. When I woke up on Sunday, I had to decide if it had all been a dream or not... my feet, sore from walking so far on my wooden geta, assured me it had been very, very real.