Live from Japan!

So last night danielle and I went to the second weekend of the Nagaragawa (Nagara river) firework show. Holy crap. Apparently, what we do in the US on the forth of july is shoot off a couple of bottle rockets and call her good. Here they go all out intense for two hours. Imagine the two best firework shows you ever saw in the US now stack them on top of each other, and repeat until two hours are up. You might think you are starting to get an idea of the intensity, but it is simply not possible. It is so long, in fact, that about 2/3rds of the way through the show you actually start to get board of fireworks. I was told that, as americans we think that we have to just sit and watch every firework, for fear that you will miss something. Here, however is like watching a sports game, you watch for a bit, have a chat with some people, go get some snacks, sit back down, watch some more. Takes some getting used to, but very cool. The weird thing was that when it was all said and done, a bunch of the re-contracted jets were like, “bah, last weeks was better.”

This was part of the first official jet outing for gifu city jets, however tons of jets from all over the prefecture made it down. We took a tour of downtown gifu, sighting out the locations of fun stuff like, the gaijin (foreigner) bar, some good local food establishments, where people can buy english language books, etc. and some important stuff, like where we can get cheap one on one japanese lessons, and where to buy the reentry permits for our visas, allowing us to leave and reenter the country. This would have been quite pleasant if not for the crazy heat. Danielle posted about it but, there is no joke. You just have to become comfortable that you are going to be drenched in sweat, at all hours that you are not in air conditioning.

The highlight however, was the trip to hanabi. Kevin our regional prefectural advisor (rpa) was quite annoyed because we left on our 40 some minute walk about an hour late. He used it as an excuse to start his drinking early and it all worked out however because some other jets had taped off an awesome spot for us to watch the fireworks some two days prior. We all got there about 15 minutes before the show began. Crazy awesome, see above. Danielle and I also got some festival food, starting with some yakisoba, which neither of us particularly cared for, and then later we each got a giant Wiinaa furankufuruto (frankfort wiener) on a skewer (innuendo abounds), and lots and lots of our new favorite drink, Aquarius, which is something like a sweet gatorade.