Last weekend I bought trinkets in Peru. I watched a Chinese dragon dance. I photographed a man from Ghana with skin so dark his teeth looked like stars in a midnight sky.
Last Sunday it was not enough for me to be an American in Japan. I had to be an American in Japan, eating a German pretzel.
My friend Carol and I took the train to Yokohama. It was a beautiful day, so I stopped to take some postcard shots of landmark tower.
Then we payed 200 yen each to get into Octoberfest. There, Japanese men and women, and a few ex patriots, sat at long tables under the hot sun drinking beer from glass steins the size of pitchers. We bought deformed German pretzels and gawked at the costumes.
One Japanese man was dressed in leiderhosen. Another wore a beer mug head piece.
We even spotted a few girls in German bar maid costumes who spoke English in authentic German accents.
Since I don't really like beer and it was warm and crowded enough to make Carol not want to partake, we soon moved on to the World Festa.
There, in the corner of a long park, we found booths from the diverse countries of the globe. Ghana, Chili, Sri Lanka, Napal, the Republic of Sudan, Turkey and many more were represented. I wondered how Yokohama put this all together. Did somebody call up Spain and say, "hey guys, we're having a party. Bring your giant skillet"?
At one point I stopped to buy my mother something from the Peru booth. "Sumimasen," I said to the man, and showed him the object I wanted to buy. "1000 yen," he answered in English. I stood in a park in Japan, asking a Peruvian man, in English, what the cost of object in my hand was, and then paid him in Japanese Yen.
To quote that old Disney ride, "it's a small, small world."
We stopped to watch the Chinese dragon dancers (see previous post). Then made a circuit of the whole event - a world tour. I felt like I was playing Katamari in real life, like I could just role up the whole world one booth at a time.
The only silly part of the whole thing was the United States of America booth. It was just a tent full of helium balloons - no food, no crafts for sale, just hundreds of cartoon character shaped balloons.
On our way out we stopped to take a picture of a pair of woman in cultural costumes.
And again to photograph the kimono clad girls, fascinated by a man with a rabbit on a leash.
I leave you today with a quote from the best commercial of all time, it used to run all the time on the Discovery Channel. "I love the mountains, I love the clear blue skies ... I love the whole world, and all it's craziness, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da..."
Posts
