so, like last year, we went to rachel's house to see the nakatsu gion festival. we actually drove to nakatsu on saturday afternoon and stayed the night with rachel and her family. that meant i got to help out preparing for the party! we stayed up late chopping veggies while having a couple of beers, and taste-testing the gion cocktail rachel made up (it was yummy!) as usual, the pictures tell (most of) the story:

first up, a cake that amy made. as in, she made the cake from scratch, cut it out, made and colored the frosting and then decorated it. it looks like a gion-guruma, isn't it fabulous?? and, it tasted great, too! yum!!



this was taken fairly early in the morning (before 10). amy, sasha, erica and hiro had on festival attire, but lena didn't want to wear a yukata and i forgot tommy's jimbei at home! amy broke out the yogurt and jam and suddenly there was silence. it was nice.



preparing for guests to arrive:



tammy's son andrew with amy



group hug (and can i just say that amy's photo smile has gotten gorgeous?!?)



waiting for the first guruma (and i asked sasha to knock off the peace sign thing, and she did a pretty good job for the rest of the day!)





sasha's kinda like, who are these weird guys??



so much food!







then, dancers!



suddenly, one of the old fellas in this 'town' (for the guruma) took off his coat and belt and put it on hiro:





if you check out the blog post from last year, i'm pretty sure the little kid in front of the coke machine is the same one who was begging his mom for a drink last year.







ok, ok, this is getting long. more dancers!













sasha wants to be a dancer on the gion-guruma. maybe someday!











then it was the end, and the mikoshi came by, followed by a man being pulled in a rickshaw.







and that was it! we had to leave early because it was also the kindy's summer festival yesterday. such a busy day!! but the kids still got to splash in the pool and we enjoyed the great food. thanks for having us, rachel!

two (very) short videos of a couple of dances.





surprisingly, these aren't all the photos i posted to flickr. check them out!