Lantern Festival

I just set up some links to your left side of the screen that will take you to all my photos and some other random stuff. I went really overboard with the pictures this weekend at the lantern festival.
Yesterday before the festival I also went to a movie premiere at the Wellness Center in Miyakonojo. The movie was about the declining Geisha population of Japan and the process of becoming part of the Geisha community. It was visually a really cool movie and about half the movie was in English which was nice. After the movie they had a Geisha from the movie dance and perform a tea ceremony. It was really amazing to watch. The lantern festival was also really great but wearing a kimono got old by the end of the day. Kimonos are sometimes about 10,000 dollars so I was really afraid of getting something on it since it was not mine. Someone told me that Japanese women usually get a really nice kimono on their 20th birthday but these days sometimes they prefer a car instead. It was fairly restricting but it was cool to have worn one at least once. The festival was in a smaller town that foreigners don't often visit, so everyone was taking photos of my co-worker Sarah and I. I just starting waving at the camera and greeting them in Japanese and then they pretended like they weren't photographing me. I think it was a combination of us being foreign and the fact that we were wearing kimonos. We went to this really famous Japanese tofu restaurant before going to the Takanabe lantern festival. It was really good and the tofu was amazing but my feet fell asleep from sitting on the ground and I couldn't walk for awhile. I tried a bite of octopus and I vow to never do so again. Sarah and I were talking about going to some hot springs on the bus ride over to Takanabe and we met some girls our age that said they would take us to the medicinal volcanic clay hot springs sometime soon. A lot of Japanese people want to take us places and show us around. It is nice to have so many personal tour guides. After the festival Sarah and I went out with our other co-worker Patrick and we did a little Karaoke. Most places that you go out to here have a charge of about 20 dollars or so and you can drink until 7:00 in the morning. This is a necessity as all the food portions here are so tiny that I feel like I need the extra caloric intake of lots of beer. There are crazy huge spiders and bugs everywhere here and I got eaten alive by mosquitoes last night so I am going to go itch them right now. Here is a clip of the tofu restaurant.