Culture Shock: Saturday, May 22

A friend of mine, Amir Sattari, has been studying at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since last September. We sent a few emails back and forth and decided to spend the day in Yokohama. See, Amir goes to school in Tokyo, but he lives about 20 or 30 minutes from Yokohama. In the 8-9 months he's been there, he has never been to Yokohama, so I decided we had to fix that. Unfortunately, he still has never been to Yokohama, because we didn't go.

As I got off the bus at Yokosuka Chuou, I couldn't help but notice the dozens of vendors selling different kinds of food or hosting different games. They were having a festival (Japanese - (お)祭り - (o)matsuri). I was at the station the night before and saw them setting up, but I asked someone when they were having it, and he said on Sunday. In retrospect, I think he probably meant that the parade part was on Sunday. In any case, I hadn't been to a Japanese festival before, so I called Amir and asked him if he wanted to come to the festival instead. I then had to endure seeing and smelling all the different foods for about an hour and a half until he finally arrived.

For those of you who don't know Amir, he is very soft spoken. And a ninja. We didn't know he was going to Japan until he was already there. Months after he left, we were still expecting to see him appear out of nowhere whenever we looked over our shoulders. When he was getting close to the station, I stood in an open area and watched every direction from which he could possibly appear. I'm not even kidding. He ended up not sneaking up on me, but I was completely suspecting it.

I should have taken more pictures of the food. This first one is probably takoyaki (たこ焼き). It looks a little big, though, so I may be wrong. Takoyaki is a fried octopus ball. They're really good, but the inside is really hot, and I always seem to burn my mouth on them.

The next is two are cartoon shaped pastries filled with a red bean paste (Japanese: 餡子 - anko). I should have taken a closer picture of the first one. They're shaped like Pikachu. In the second picture, they're shaped like Doraemon and Hello Kitty. Also, look at the little man in the middle of that banner (between Pooh and Pikachu). It took me a while to figure out that his name is Anpanman. Anpan is bread with anko inside, and Anpanman is just a cartoon version of it. You can even buy Anpanman shaped anpan.