Photo Journal of a Piss-Ant Festival

This is the ad for the Hamamatsu Flower Festival held today:

Hamamatsu Flower Festival 2005 : 36th
Autumn City Greenification Festival

This event celebrates the birth of the new City of Hamamatsu with flowers and greenery
When Oct. 1st & 2nd (Sat.-Sun.) 10:00 am – 4:00 pm (regardless of weather)
Where Act Dori (Including the East Fureai Park)
What Exhibits and sales of flowers and plants, vendor and concession stands, garden and flowerbed product stands, musical concerts among the flowers, free gifts of flower and plant seedlings, and more!
* Just come! No advance notice required.
Greenification Promotion Division (053) 457-2565

First of all, no advance notice required? Gee, thanks, I'm glad I didn't have to RSVP a street festival! And second what a let down. There were about 10 stalls in all. One even had flowers. One sold Raggedy Ann dolls, one sold cell phone charms. And this guy was just a huckster.




He was selling a variety of odd gadgets. One sliced the peel of of gratefruits, and opened the segments so you could eat just the pulp. And he sold hollowed out acorns that would whistle when you blew over thier tops. But he was obviously giving a hilarious spiel about how his items sliced and diced and even caught fish. Doesn't matter the language, you can spot a snake oil salesman when you see one. And the rest of the stalls sold dried fish, or fresh fish, or fish on a stick, or fish deep fried and decorated with ribbons, or ....oh, you get the idea.



The festival was started off with some cool drum playing to attract your attention. Then a bunch of old respectable dignatary geezer types in matching outfits threw motchi (a Japanese sweet) out to the crowd. They had lousy arms and only the people in the first 3 rows got anything.



And the folks from the Kakegawa bird park were there showing off a few owls and one pissy penguin.



There was also this table of high school nerds working these little robots. What that has to do with flowers I'm not sure, but it was amusing.



As I started to walk back to class this dance troupe began, and they were pretty good, I wish I could have stayed.



But that was it. For a town of 800,000 it was pretty lame. I've been to school carnivals that had more going on. Well, on the bright side the weather was lovely and it was a good way to kill some time between classes.