Yokohama Hanabi!

Yesterday was an awesome day. Me, Na Young and Su Jin from class went to Yokohama to watch the famous "hanabi" festival. Hanabi litterarly means "Flower Fire" which translates into fireworks. And boy, were there fireworks... (videos of that at the end of this blog, do not miss!) Also, this was the first day in my life where I only spoke japanese. Go me! Although I speak japanese like a late five year old who hasn't learned to talk yet...

The actual festival would start around 7:30PM but we decided to go there really early and do some sight-seeing and stuff. we began by just walking down the streets there. It actually is different to Tokyo somehow... it's hard to put a finger on it, but it certainly was different. I really liked Yokohama though, less neon-esque than my current home, but I really liked the streets and buildings. Everything was so spot clean and stylish.

Yokohama is very beautiful by the fact that it is very green. Everywhere you see green hills, parks and avenues with lots of palm trees. The cool thing is that you see these futuristic elements and high-rise skyscrapers embedded into the green-themed palette, which makes it look like almost like an utopia. The crystal clear azure sky helped, also =)

The bay area. This is the outskirts of an adjacent park.

One of many high-rise buildings. This is a hospital I think.

Our first stop was China Town. The China Town in Yokohama is one of the biggest ones in the world, and it really had a special vibe to it. The shops in China Town were very, very cool. They were typically japanese by the fact that they were very crowded and too small for their merchandise. What they lacked in size they made up for in floors though, since most shops had at least three floors - regardless of what kind of shops they were. It was certainly cool to walk four floors of panda-toys and dolls. And of course, "some" of us had a compulsive need to be photographed with a man in a panda costume.

Na Young and a panda.

A shrine in China Town

While roaming the narrow and crowded streets it was like stepping foot in another country. Like China, but cleaner and without pick-pockets probably. And while still being Japan, things were pretty expensive here. Although I think I've gotten too accustomed to the Japanese food prices, because I always try to stay away from restaurants serving dinner over 1000Yen. For 1000Yen back in Sweden, you won't get dinner anywhere... besides MacDonald's and other fast-food shacks. We finally found a really cute restaurant in China Town and got some amazingly delicious food and drinks for 800Yen (about $8, or 45-50 SEK).

After dinner we went to "Itaria Gaadensu" or "The Italian Gardens" which were located on a large hill in Yokohama. In old times, rich merchant families settled here, so it was cool to see proof of european-styled mansions amongst japanese architecture. We immortalized our visit by writing down the following on the guest-book in the mansion:

"Su Jin, Na Young and Christian were here. Sayounara. Hanabi!" The artsy illustrations were done by Na Young...

The diplomat's garden.

After the gardens we thought we'd head towards the bay area were the fireworks would start in two hours. We took a little detour to walk the beautiful shopping avenues of Yokohama. There were lots of strange people there... apparently this street is famous for its animal shops, like dressing up dogs and stuff. Creepy, I thought. Kawaiiii, my entourage thought.

Anyway, we went to the harbours to settle down. It took about 30 minutes to find a good spot, since we forgot that half the earth's population also had a keen interest in seeing the fireworks. Miraculously we found an unused square metre of space which we claimed in the name of everything that's good and pure!

When the fireworks finally started, we recognized that all the hype and talk held true. They went on for an hour and 40 minutes with continues fireworks filling up the night sky. Sometimes they fired up "smiley faces" and those mushroom fiends from Super Mario which was too awesome for words. When they fired up Naruto-symbol fireworks the nerdy women behind me screamed their lungs out. I won't post any pictures since clearly demonstrated them better, so in the end of this entry there are links to the videos I shot.

Whenever there are fireworks festivals and similiar events here in Japan, it is tradition for both men and (especially) women to dress up in Yakuta or Kimono, the national dress. Seriously, this has got to be the most beautiful dress in the entire world! When you're in a crowd of thousands of yakuta-wearing women it's hard not to ignore the actual hanabi. And also, if you think that japanese young children are cute, you haven't seen them in yakuta!

It's going to be a loooong time before I see something as impressive as the Yokohama hanabi. But apparenty, this one was the "smaller" of the hanabi events. But honestly, I don't want to imagine even more people watching fireworks... I was planning on doing a stage-dive to get through them all faster at one point.

After the fireworks had ended and the massive crowd of people were heading for the city streets, we decided to go to the Cosmo World! The Cosmo World is an amusement park in the middle of Yokohama with extremely addictive roller-coasters and other entertainment. Na Young had actually never been in a roller coaster before and was nervous like hell, so needless to say I set us up for the most extreme ride I could find there. It was fun, she screamed her lungs out! It's something special to be spun around in a sub-sonic whirlwind and see glimts of the Yokohama skyline while upside down.

I strongly recommend you to check out http://www.npointercos.jp/Yokohama.html for some really good pictures of Yokohama. Anyway, here are the rest of my pictures:

Na Young-san

Who's the idiot doing the peace-sign the wrong way?

The streets of China Town

Anachronism

I guess they were thinking; "If we can't fit it on the ground..."

The colours of an utopia

Na Young with a Swedish 50kr bill

I'm still grumpy that all the video hosts I've found screw up the quality of the film, but still, here are the videos

Hanabi "smileys"
Hanabi finale
Strange cat person
Yukata child