Nagasaki Lantern Festival

So yesterday's post was pretty dark. I felt like the subject matter deserved some space, so I chose not to clutter with other stuff. Today, however, I want to emphasize that we also had a lot of fun in Nagasaki. I know many people back home only think of tragedy in connection to this city, but it's actually a beautiful and lively place that I would love to visit again.

The riverside view was like, nice and stuff. Also, look at my legs here and think of a fat-tailed mermaid. Just try!

Being a one-day field trip arranged by the school, we didn't really have time for much other than the main attraction of the season: The Nagasaki Lantern Festival in Chinatown. According to my host mother this is a relatively recent cultural import (should probably research this thing for y'all but I am a lazy bum so I say you do it if you want to know so bad).

Here is a picture of Chinese lanterns:

Here is a picture of me immitating a Chinese lantern:

And here is my face, still immitating a Chinese lantern:

Lantern Festival!



But all jokes aside, this festival was really all about the food (for me anyway). So much street food! Ehrmagehrd!

Fresh meronpan: Sweet bun wrapped in cookie dough, soft inside crispy outside and yummy all over!

And then: 100yen oysters. One oyster; One. Hundred. Yen. For you un-currency-savvy out there, that's juuuust about 6 NOK. Yeah. Six. Back home, I've never really seen them sold for less than 80.

Q: How many oysters could an oyster-shuck shuck if an oyster-shuck could shuck oysters?
A: He can, and a lot.

I've never actually had an oyster before, because of the afforementioned high norwegian price on their not-heads. Here, I had several. Spoiler alert: turns out I like oysters.

Also beer.

Yakitori (skewerd grilled chicken) is (are? dunno. Grammar. 0.o ) for me one of the highligts of Japanese cuisine. Probably because I've almost always been drunk-hungry when eating it and thus hold my memories of this food in the highest of esteems (and I appologize for my English today, I'm very highly not not tired).

<3

YAKITORI SELFIE!

YUM!

I actually had even more food, but I was too busy eating it to document.

Then I stumbeled upon some stairs (figuratively and literally). And I love me some stairs.

Snapped some more photos here and there, and they randomly turned out to be eriely like a pokemon evolution series!

Magi-karp-karp

Dragon!

Dragons!

Dracarys, m*thrf*kr

I managed to turn it to stone after our final battle though, so we all survived.

Victory is sweet.

However it wasn't until the light faded that you could see what this festival was really all about. Which was lanterns (as you really should have guessed). But you know, giving off actual light.

And I even managed to snap a photo that isn't complete rubbish:

It looks nice, but it was actually cold as shit.