Thwarted by Typhoon!

Typhoon Man-yi spent the last 2 days dumping -6- inches of rain on us, so Catie & I didn’t get to enjoy the festival as I’d hoped. Andy got to participate, and had the bruises, rope burn, and sore muscles to prove it. After we went to festival on Saturday afternoon, Andy went back and carried one of the mikoshi for several hours before attending the big after party at Hanchmangu. On Sunday, it rained cats & dogs all day. Catie & I spent 4 hours playing at Kokko then got drenched on our walk home. We’d seen a couple of the dashi go by earlier in the day (you hear them long before you see them, so we all ran out of Kokko to watch). The dashi were wrapped in plastic and all the people had big raincoats on, so you really couldn’t much. Because we were already so wet and Catie was tired, I didn’t see the point in pushing her just to see a parade of plastic-covered things, so we decided not to head back down for the 6 PM parade. Andy had been pulling a float since noon and told me that it stopped raining just in time for the parade. It sounded like such a cool experience! If Catie were a few years older we would have participated too, but it wasn’t to be this year. We never did go downtown to watch Yabusame on Monday because it poured all day. I definitely felt thwarted by the typhoon!!!

here's the shrine Andy & the group carried