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.