Happy Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving I went to an international dinner/party in the city. Ever wondered what Thanksgiving dinner would look like at a Japanese restaurant? Well, wonder no more.

That is actual turkey, both light and dark meat, a...cup of cranberry sauce, and some veggies.

And this is the pumpkin pie--well, technically kabocha pie, the slightly different Japanese pumpkin.

If you're like me, you're probably thinking, "That is not nearly enough food to pig out on in true American tradition," and no, it wasn't. But it made up for it by being honest-to-goodness delicious turkey--a meat that's nearly impossible to find in Japan. And I was thankful for it.

Autumn in Oita Prefecture

Today I'm just going to post an assortment of pictures I've taken in the past couple weeks.

These first two are from the city of Yuufuin. I went there last year in autumn too, almost a year ago.



These pictures are all from Yabakei. It seems to be a pretty popular spot for autumn-leaf-viewing, and not without good reason, since it's gorgeous.



These pinwheels were just on the side of the road. I thought it was a cool way to decorate the rice fields while they're dead and brown in this season.



This tree was so huge I couldn't get it all in one shot.


And that's a little of what Oita Prefecture looks like in autumn.

Kousa

This is the view outside my apartment. I wish I had a comparison shot, because usually I have a nice view of the mountains from here. You can sort of make one out behind the houses, but it's hazy.

That's not because of fog. It's because of the Japanese vocabulary word I learned today: kousa. There's no single translation for this in English. It's the Japanese word for yellow dust that comes over from China because of pollution.

Apparently it's strange because usually this only happens in springtime, and we're well into autumn now. No fun for people with allergies.

Saga International Balloon Fiesta

Yesterday I went to the Saga International Balloon Fiesta! I'd been wanting to go ever since I saw the posters advertising last year's festival, so I was really happy to go this year. It's quite a distance from my town to Saga Prefecture, and incredibly expensive by train, so I was lucky to get ride.

Once we parked with the thousands of other cars and walked to the festival grounds, this is what we saw:

There were tons of stalls of festival food, but of course what we came for was the balloons. Here's a video of the first balloon we saw lifting off:

It was pretty cool. Being an international event, one of the announcers spoke English, and the pilots were from all different countries. I saw a few other foreigners as I was walking around, but not many. There were a lot of people there, though.


There were a lot of balloons, too.




They were really far away at first, but getting gradually closer. It took us a little while to realize that they were in a race, and the festival grounds was the finish line. When they started coming in, it was amazing.





The goal of the race was for them to drop a marker onto a target in front of the crowd. Here's one doing just that:

Some of them missed, and some of them came in after the allotted race time was over, but it was still awesome to watch.

After the race finished, we had dinner, eating up all that delicious festival food. By the time we had finished, the balloons were being set up to be illuminated. Unfortunately, it was really hard to get good pictures of, but I did my best.



When the festival ended, we got stuck trying to get out of the parking lot for the longest time, but that didn't change the fact that it was a fantastic day.