Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 19 - On With the Festivities!

My plan to wake up healthy was only partially realized. The pillows we got at Zenkoji were so thin they were almost invisible. I slept ok, but woke up stiff with pressure still humming in my ears. Other than that, all good.

We had a leaisurly morning before checking out, leaving our luggage, and heading to the Takayama festival. It was only 10:30 in the morning, but the festival was in full swing. 

There were tons of food stalls and souvenir stalls, and on the street in front of the shrine were the yatai (festival floats I think) all lined up. There are 11, though I didn't count to see if they were all present, and they are all considered national treasures or something. They were pretty cool, but as normal, I was swallowed up by the desire to take pictures and spent more time doing that then looking at the yatai. One reason why I am sometimes loath to carry a camera. 

The one festival performance I had wanted to see was the Karakuri performance, which is a puppet show. This particular performance features three puppets, a priest or god of some sort, and two acrobatic children, a girl and a boy. They were supposed to dance to the music, which was traditional Japanese and cool sounding, but as far as I could see (which was never very clearly), dancing considered of the main puppet bobbing his head in time to the music and moving back and forward. The boy acrobat did chin ups and pull overs. The girl just ran around the main puppet. It is possible that they eventually did something else, but we wouldn't know, since we left. We did see at least two TV cameras set up to record the performance, so maybe we can find it later online. 

See that little red thing off in the distance? That is the puppet stage.

We went in search of food, where daunted by the choices, and then got some stuff and left the festival in search of drinks. We were planing to go back, but the search for drinks took longer than expected, so in the end we returned for our luggage and said farewell to Takayama. 

We enjoyed a lovely train ride back to Tokyo and may have seen the bottom half of Mt Fuji on our way. We arrived shortly after five and set about finding our hotel. This time we are I. The Shinjuku area. Our room is actually a service appartment, which is nice.

Once we had relaxed a bit we were out the door again in search of food. We found a cute little yakiniku place and enjoyed.

We wandered around a bit, looking at the lights and all the people.

Eventually we retired for a good nights sleep in real beds.