Tanabata and The Plague

 It's finally Tanabata festival time! Hot, sunny, and plenty humid, we left a little earlier than planned to get to the station for some breakfast before the parade started at 11am, so after lolling around at Andersen's for a while, we walked up to the parade route and walked the street, which was already full of people browsing the stalls, eating bad fried food and having beer (at 10am). 

We ended up standing right at the start of the parade route when the mayor and all the other important Old Guys With Hats™ mumbled incoherently into a microphone to a smattering of applause from the onlookers. There was an odd ribbon cutting ceremony where about 20 Old Guys With Hats™ (probably sponsors of the festivities) were handed scissors and they all cut at the same time, leaving lots of short strips of ribbon on the ground. With that thrilling opening, the parade was finally underway!

Now, the parade is really just some grade school and middle school marching bands, but I was curious. As it turned out, the opening group was a private high school's drum corps, and they were quite good. The all-girl color guard uniforms were ripped straight from 1980's anime, complete with go-go boots. In fact, the whole beginning felt like that. The start of the parade was a pair of Toyko motorcycle cops. But they were not only both women (rare in the Tokyo police force), but the exact same height and overall build (hint: not very large) with matching red uniforms (complete with white gloves). I half-expected to hear bad 80's guitar riffs and watch their bikes morph into fighting mechs and take off like an episode of Bubblegum Crisis. But their hair wasn't all poofy and neon-colored (at least that I could see), so we were relatively safe from killer robots this morning.

Pre-parade lineup

Drum Majorette at attention.

Ready to take off into Megazone 23! Wish we had better pictures of the officers.

There rest of the parade consisted of middle school bands. Most were pretty decent and better than your typical US high school. One was very young kids and....they sounded like it, but it was fun and the crowd was encouraging.

As it turns out, that was the end of the day for us. Sumi caught some virus somewhere and was in pretty bad shape. We went back to the ryoukan to be in air conditioning and she pretty much passed out. I did some work and some planning for the next week, walked over to the nearby Coin Laundry Sentacky (a bad play on words in Japanese. Sentaku is laundry) to get that taken care of, and then at about 8pm realized we never ate anything after a few pastries for breakfast. Sumi was still out when I got back from doing the laundry, so I took a walk over to a local eatery alone.

If Sumi reads the blog, this will be the first time she will find out I went to Coco Curry without her :-O

Delicious, but not the same eating alone.

So with that, I headed back to the ryoukan, knowing full well that I'm going to be trapped in a very small room with a very sick person, meaning it is quite likely there will be two very sick people soon.