Mission:Monkey...check!

On Saturday I went to a festival in Akita with a couple of friends.; Kanto it's called. It's a festival where especially talented people balance long long bamboo poles with branches almost, with many many paper lanterns hanging off of them. These things are like 20 feet tall, and have a width of about 6 or 8 paper lanterns across. (They're supposed to look like rice plants right before the harvest, with lots and lots of rice on them to encourage the gods to give them a good harvest.) But these amazing people balance these things on their hands, their shoulders, their heads, their hips, and it's just incredible. Hundreds of them do it all at the same time, filling this one street, while thousands of people are watching. After the professionals finished, normal people could try to balance the kanto. And I did it!! I got one balanced on my hand! Just on a kids' one though, not nearly as tall or hard to do as the normal sized ones, but hey, I'm proud. I even have a picture to prove it. One of my friends I went with got it balanced not just on his hand, but on his shoulder! It was crazy.

Then I went to another festival tonight. Japan's crazy in the summer for festivals; I've been told it's in between the rice planting and harvesting, plus it's not cold, so they plan all their festivals for the summer. It was fireworks, but with live Japanese drumming behind it. There's something that makes fireworks so much more exciting when there's drumming too.

And I have an amazing thing to report: one of my missions is complete. I wasn't even hunting, and I found a monkey in the wild!! Yesterday we were driving to Odate for supper, and a monkey popped out of the bushes. We slowed down the car and Kaila rolled down her window. The monkey may or may not have almost jumped in the car... it was a big and ugly monkey. It stared at me with its wrinkly eyes. We kept driving because there were cars behind us, but I asked if we could turn around so I could take a picture. So we went on an impromptu monkey hunt. We got to take some pictures, and then it disappeared into the bushes again. I don't know what possessed us to do this, but me and Kaila got out of the car to go look for it. We kept the car door open in case of an emergency, and clung to each other out of fear of getting monkey mauled. (I was the kind friend and held her in front of me as we walked.) What an amazing day that was. God gave me a monkey, even though it was big and ugly and had a red bum and wrinkly eyes.