Jon,
I hesitate to agree with your claim that "The Hulk is the best @#%&*^(())+$#$%@# damn ?"{#$@^&*()@ movie ever made". I'm sorry. We all are.

Moving on, a wonderful overview of New Zealand Culture is now available on-line. I will be pointing any and all queries directed towards me in regards to New Zealands identity in the world towards this fact-filled delight.

Now, back to the Obon celebrations....

As you will no doubt recall, our intrepid cultural ambassadors had just alighted from their special train and were wending their way towards the celebrations....

Gujo is a really pretty little place, at least at nighttime it is. Gifu prefecture has an awful lot of mountains in it, The Japanese Alps for example. Gujo is nestled in some pretty mountainous country with a large castle overlooking the town and a bunch of rivers running through it. (I looked for Brad Pitt and Mr. Newman, to no avail). We knew we were on the right track when we arrived at the Festival Food stalls. Mmmmmmm festival food.

A QUICK ASIDE ON FOOD IN JAPAN...Food, in general is seen as a very large part of the identity of domestic Japan. Take Ramen for example. Noodles. Good old, bog standard noodles, imported from China a bullion years ago. But still the identities of many different parts of Japan are tied up in their version of the original recipe. Fukuoka, for example, in the Southern Island of Kyushu, where I was for my exchange, has Hakata ramen, named after the central area of the city. Hakata Ramen is basically an entire pig carcass, placed ever so delicately in an enormous pot and boiled to buggery for a day or two into a thick, white, oily, pig-gy, really, really dirty good soup. Add noodles, et, voila (excuse my French) a regional delicacy. Ask for Hakata Ramen anywhere in Japan and this is what you'll get. The Ramen from Tokyo are, as far as I can recall, based around a soya sauce soup, Hokkaido has a salt based soup and so on. It is interesting to talk to many Japanese people about their domestic travel...

"How was your trip to blahblahblah?"

"The Ramen was delicious"...

"I want to go to Hokkaido"

"Why?"

"I hear the Ramen is delicious"

It is quite difficult to overstate how important gastronomy is as an identifying factor for regions in Japan. I digress. Back to the festival food. With festival food, the more the food is fried, the better the food is. Mmmmmmmmm fried festival food.

Deep Fried chicken, Deep fried squid, Fried Noodles, Fried Meat, ...Mmmmmmm Fried stuff. It tastes good and is not necessarily 100% proven with finality to be the only major cause of heart disease. Mmmmm.

So. Greasy chicken in one hand, warmed up defribulators (sp?) in the other we marched on to the festival. At first it seemed a teeming mass of people, on closer inspection however it turn out to be... a teeming mass of people. So we wendled our way in and joined the throng. it was estimated that 100,000 people were there that night, I estimate about 60% of them were in fact fried food vendors but still there were a ton of people doing the dance and methodically shuffling along the road in time with the minstrels. We caught on to the particular dances pretty quick, and as they each went on for 20-30 minutes before a brief break and the launch into the next, we got prety good at them by the changeover.

It was very interesting. You are standing in a line, doing these ritualistic dances (cranes flying, warriors on steeds - no
"chopping-thewood" or "top-shelf-middle-shelf-bottom-shelf-trolley" though) that have been done for a few hundred years, over and over, and over again and it can get very trance-like. Just shuffling along and all of a sudden your 30 metres away from where you last remember being- all very odd.

Right. Thats enough for today. Have a swell weekend.
tata.