Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Hanabi - 2008

Hanabi translates directly into Flower Fire, but means fireworks and everyone in Japan seems to love Hanabi. The photo below was a few hours before the start of the show and you can all ready see the mass of people and boats building up. Yukie actually invited me to watch this fireworks show at Tokyo bay a few months ago when I first moved to Japan and at the time I did not understand how big of a deal this really was. Since then, I have learned that there are many very famous fireworks show in many cities in Japan every weekend. But this fireworks show is quite a big deal.The condo was on the 9th floor of this building next to the Tokyo towers, just over my shoulder there. Those towers are new, I guess one of the Japanese MLB players from NY has a place there. The show started right at 7:00 with this first set of fireworks:The show was a hour and twenty minutes long, so we had these snack off to the side, just in case someone wanted a bite to eat.Yukie made the rice cover nori off on the left, it was really good.This is towards the end of the show. My train home was 10pm, the show ended at 8:20pm, between the condo and Tokyo station was about a 30 minutes bus ride on a normal day. But, today, there was about 100000 people who wanted to take the bus to the train station. So right as the show finished, while people were still clapping the end of the show, I made a b-line down to the bus stand and got in line. I ended up only having to wait for one bus, and got to Tokyo station with 20 minutes to spare.Couple of more photos from Toyko bay...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see you update your blog from Philippines. Thank you so much for coming. We were really happy to have you. Fireworks are so important in Japanese culture that summer wouldn’t be summer without them...!