24th august
the next day, we left our host family for kanazawa's new host family. it was a bittersweet goodbye. i really loved my host family :(
some final photos at the sakuda's house

kanoko was hiding behind hiroko since she still didn't want to take any photos

but she let me took lots of photos in the car (-_-`)


kinda reminded me of fengkai and yingxuan

group photo of all the nomishi students

even the last last photo, kanoko still wouldn't appear (;_;)

but it was already time to go...

around 530pm, we started getting ready for the bon odori festival. hiroko dressed me and lauren up in her yukatas!



and lauren! she looks awesome in her black yukata. lots of people complimented her. one friend said that she looks like the sister-leader of a triad society haha.


little kanoko was going as well! kanoko hates taking photographs by the way, so i was pretty proud of myself when i took a shot like this of her. she wasn't posing for me, it just so happens that she was trying to cover her face and i caught it


after that, she wouldn't allow anymore pictures

about 6+pm, we arrived at the gathering place for the bon odori and saw eun-geong waiting there already

went in to the dinner area and started photo-spamming
chea-san (from cambodia) with his host family's kid. he's seriously damn fatherly

managed to take our family photo as well but kanoko looks so mortified

group photo!


haredy (from egypt) didn't wear a yukata. sad.

lauren was wearing makoto's geta because hiroko's geta was too small for her. she later found that a random grandpa wore exactly the same geta as her. lol.

we then took a short walk to the actual matsuri scene.

what you do here is basically dance in a gigantic circle that is made up of groups of people (from schools, organizations, etc), and do a series of 11 movements repetitively until 1 huge round is finished. there are water stops at the corner of the huge circle as well.


these people on the stage sang for the repetitive song

not knowing how to dance, we followed in anyway and soon knew how to move because we were repeating it for a million times





it was tiring but pretty fun, especially when we messed up the dance steps to take photos like those above hahah




we managed to also get a quick look around the festival area when we reached our 2nd water stop. lots of stalls were set up here selling yummy food. a pity we didn't get too much time to look around because it started to rain then!


we hurried back to our parking area and waited for the 9pm hanabi to start
while waiting i played around with kanoko and we managed to trick her into taking this wonderful photo!!! WOW thanks lauren. i seriously don't know of any kids who would say that she doesn't like to look at herself in photographs. really mezurashii (rare).

somehow kanoko looks like yingxuan when she has her hair tied up.





tried to take a photo of me and the hanabi but it ended up blurred. and after this photo, it was the end of the hanabi!

it was a lovely end to our wonderful day :D

we then stopped for a rest near this place which houses an ancient tree that is over 3000year-old and is protected by the government




and ate kinako powdered mugroot (or something can't remember what it's called) dango which tasted like... elastic chewy leaves

saw a huge pumpkin outside the dango shop

then we stopped by an outside foot spa


the water was hot. and in the middle of the spa was a fountain with drinkable water that was supposed to be good for your health



ate a pork corroke there

inside the house near the foot spa was some mini-kabuki theatre. there was also lots of onsen eggs souvenirs. o_o`

about 3pm, we headed towards a supermarket. saw a tokyo-dome like thing on the way.

the kids were restless and kanoko refused to let her mom go with me and lauren to the supermarket. we felt like we were kidnapping hiroko. kanoko cried like mad so in the end we had to hasten our shopping trip. poor makoto also looked like he was in a disarray.
we quickly went home after we were done with our grocery shopping and prepared to cook.
lauren prepared a cocopops-coconut brownie dessert like thingy.

and we also helped out with the okonomiyaki preparation

hiroko looking pro as she fries the okonomiyaki

and it's done!

hiroko's friend came over as well and she brought 3 sons and some food along.


maguro

yummy! and by the time we were finishing off, lauren's dessert was done solidifying in the freezer

yum yum~~