Patrick: I love fireworks..

Yesterday I attended a fireworks show at Hamaotsu off of Lake Biwa with Mary and her boyfriend, Isaac. Isaac graduated from Caltech and was visiting from Spain where he studies musical instruments on a fellowship. We joined a much larger group organized by the DESA club consisting of other foreign exchange students from Taiwan and Italy. In all, there were around 70 or so foreigners and about 30 hosts from DESA. In order to ensure the quality of our viewing location, the committee members had already staked out a piece of land and laid out a tarp since 10 am. Given the Japanese enthusiasm for fireworks, I'm actually quite grateful because before yesterday my impression of Japanese fireworks have not been great; the past two times (Tenjin Festival and Sumida River Fireworks Festival) we had to settle for watching fireworks behind obstructive trees or buildings. This time there was a clearing and the fireworks were launched a fair distance off on the lake. Still, the explosions were so big that they felt much closer. The only clue to their distance was the noticeable 2 sec. lag between the sounds we heard and the explosions we saw.

We got to Hamaotsu around 5:30 pm and the show started at 7:30 pm giving us enough time to mix and mingle and catch up with some of the people we haven't seen in a while. Some things never change... Shigeo still gets picked on and talked about how he wants to go back and visit Stanford, Kosuke still towered over the others and drank a fair amount of alcohol, Tsura one of the Korean exchange students who we met during the Wakayama retreat still had amazing Japanese skillz, Ken and Yuzo still joke around and made hilarious facial expressions (although I think Yuzo brought his girlfriend instead of Daniel Radcliffe's Japanese counterpart), Mariko and Kanako were as cute as ever... sure brings back great memories (makes me want to flip through the pages of the blog ;). The Taiwanese folks were also interesting to converse with but they refused to use Japanese or English. I found myself switching back and forth from Chinese to English to Japanese but somehow we were all able to get our points across. The Taiwanese students are here for a month of study at Kyoto Zoukei University 京都造形大学; most of them from Taipei. I found it interesting that they didn't know each other and had signed up for the program by chance on the internet. The girls were especially cliquey and you could hear them gushing and screaming during the entire fireworks show...

The fireworks themselves were fantastic. So much variety, so many colors... definitely the best fireworks I have ever seen. I was especially impressed by the width of the launch site which stretched from the far left to the far right on the distant horizon. The explosions were huge and especially dazzling were the ones which seemed to explode right on the surface of the lake resulting in giant semi-circles that looked like glowing hills... it's kind of hard to describe but take a look at the pictures and videos below:

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