Burns Night! (In more ways than one.)
Weekend before last was quite magical, if full of such things as surprise!fire and Irish cross-dressing.
I'll give some background first: Nearly every day for the past month, I've driven through Aira into Kamo to go to my schools. On the way, there's a huge teepee-like structure made of branches, with three smaller teepees in a little line next to it. Like ducklings. The big one is perhaps 50 feet high, and the smaller ones ten each. I often wondered such existential things as: What are they doing there? Where did they come from? What purpose do they serve?
So when we drove by it on the way to Burns Night (Scottish festival thing celebrating their national poet, Robert Burns), and Sarah said, "Let's check it out! Turn here!", I was happy to take - what I thought - would be a small detour through the rice fields. Driving at 5 kmh behind many other cars on the tiny rice paddy road, I watched the gathering group of people.
Many of them were holding torches.
It was fairly awesome. We couldn't decide whether to stay for it or not (since we didn't want to be rude to the Scottish people), but the decision was made for us. Cars began stopping in a line in front of me. Lights were turned off. People started getting out. There was a general noise of, "Eeeeh?" inside my car, as well as bewildered questions such as, "There's no exit? Why is there no exit!" Only in Japan, my friends.
A Japanese man then walked to my car. I obligingly rolled down the window, despite the freezing cold outside. I inquired as to the exit. He said quite a lot in rapid-fire Japanese, ending with, "Muri desu." ("It's impossible.") There was a tiny uproar consisting of several sad, plaintive "Muri?"s as well as a bit of laughter. This was followed by his very decisive, "Muri," after consulting with another man. He then informed me it would only be an hour or so before we could leave. Since the people with torches were getting closer to the teepees, we decided to hurry and check it out.
I would like to note now that ballet flats (with no socks whatsoever!) are not optimal footwear for rice paddies in the dead of winter.
We got there just as they torched the branches. Pictures will follow in a later post, since I didn't have my camera at the time. Suffice to say, it was incredibly neat. There was a huge cloud of glowing embers that shot into the sky and was carried on the wind, as well. Small children ran through it like it was snow, even though it was glowing red and orange.
Sarah, as she so eloquently stated at one point, "Got hit in the head! With fire!"
I kindly wiped the ash from her hair.
I ran into some of my students at the food stall. It was strange, but also kind of neat. I'm like a celebrity or something.
After things had burned down a bit, we headed back to the car. Just in time, too, as the car in front of me left right as I started my engine. Five minutes of driving through rice field roads later, and we were back on course for the Scottish party.
Immediately after passing the largest Camphor tree in Japan, it began to snow. Big, fluffy white flakes fell down from the sky and I suddenly felt like I was driving through a screen-saver. (You know the one with all the stars that come flying at you from the black depths of space? Yeah, that one.) I have to admit this sad fact: At first, I thought it was ash. I am that deprived of the wonders of the cold. After realizing it was indeed snow, I was thrilled. Snow! Real snow! I'd never driven in snow before. Much less in Japan, where they don't believe in street lights.
No one else seemed to share my enthusiasm for it, likely because they grew up far north of me, in places where sky dandruff is normal. I was delighted, and also really tempted to try catching it on my tongue. Since I was driver-lady, I figured that was probably a really bad idea and abstained for the moment.
The Scottish festival itself was held in a relatively large hall with tatami mats. There was much dancing, drinking, and violin playing to be had. I happily butchered every Scottish dance taught to me, and clapped along as others did, too. After much merriment, we retired to the home of the Scottish people, in which there was delicious Irish soup, lots of whiskey, some poetry reading, and more dancing. (Albeit to more modern music.)
One of the guys then decided to change into the Irish girl's dancing dress and wandered around for a good part of the night flouncing his skirt and readjusting his blond, curly wig.
We left about the time the Brits all started getting frisky with one another, and I discovered that snow had accumulated on top of and around my car. Grayson is not a very big car, and looked a bit sad huddled under all of it.
I still thought it was neat, even though I lost all feeling in my hands.
The next day, I was a total bum, accomplished nothing, and made a dinner of crepes.
It was a fine weekend, followed by a great week working at one of my handicapped schools, and then another exciting weekend. But that's for another post.