I rock like prudential

TUNA FESTIVAL!

So this weekend a couple of ALTs and myself droe northwest to a little town called Oma, the northernmost point on the island of Honshu. It's famous for it meguro, or tuna , and this weekend was the annual festival in the honor fo this magnificent fish. We were kind of concerned about traffic, crowds, etc., but it just turned out to be a little more than what you see above. There were a few other tents hawking food and souveneirs (sp?) which was really cool to see. The main event, however, was the tuna itself, which was being cut up and sold in the main building you see in the picture above. Like the Blessing of the Fleet in Provincetown, each fishing boat has a banner which was hung over the doorway fo this main hall:
Or so I'm told. I don't speak Japanese. These could be advertisements for cellphones for all i know, I'm relying on the translations of the other ALTs that were with me. But like I said, the main event was cuttin gup the tuna, which people were lined up down the harbor to purchase. It was pretty cool, they had a big fish that they just slowly carved up, starting with the big tuna itself and then slowly passing the successively smaller hunks down the line to folks who would cut & then package the stuff to sell to people. Pretty cool:

While we were watching this, a local camera crew caught us off gaurd and began trying to interview one of us in broken English. When they were down with him, they said "next!" and moved onto the next guy, which was my cue to go hide behind some Japanese people. Later on, we were talking with some other Aomori ALTs who we ran into, and another TV crew came at us. THe one they spoke to luckily understood Japanese, and they asked him such interesting questions as "meguro is delicious, yes?" and the perennial "Can you use chopsticks?" Then they filmed this fat English kid eating for about ten minutes. It was at best, awkward.

I know some of you have expressed doubts as to whether I'm in Japan at all, or just in my house playing with my Xbox, so I had one of the others provide undoctored proof of me being in Japan:
Oh, and also, there was a lot fo good food. We ate some barbequed Tuna and Tuna jerky, plus this delicious scallop:

After a while we got kind of bored, so we decided to leave. The Shimokita Penninsula is shaped a little like a westward facing axe, and we were sort of at the most northwestern point. We decided at that point to just drive the hell around the whole thing and do a little exploring. So we drove along the coast, which is very mountainous and there's a lot of cool geology goin on out here:

At one point, wicked high up in the mountains, we found a small rest stop that looked out on these cool rocks along the coast. Huzzah, rocks!

Then we ran into monkeys!


The money shot:

So with our adventure complete, we returned to Mutsu and went out to an all-you-can-drink karaoke place, which was excellent.

I'm cold. I'm going to take a shower now. Take care.