A day of fireworks

I woke up around 10am. I packed for Okinawa all day until I left my house at 3pm to meet YSki at 4pm at Chinatown. The packing wasn’t so bad since I didn’t have many things to bring, but I’m not sure what I will need. That made things a little bit harder. I also discovered that I need to buy a new day bag to carry things around. It’s too much of a pain to stick things in my pocket, that’s not acceptable anymore and I’m not too happy with carrying around my backpack all the time. I think that it gets to the point of being tacky sometimes, so now I’m on the lookout for a new carrying bag for my usual stuff that I need. Putting things in my pocket always weigh down my shorts, so I will need to buy one today or when I go to Okinawa tomorrow.

It took a little time to locate YSki in Chinatown since it was packed and a half. There were already a lot of people by the time I had arrived there. I learned quickly that I should have brought some duct tape to mark the spot that I wanted because that’s what many people did and no one took their spot. I thought that was amazing because no one took it. In America, I think that if you put duct tape on a spot on the grass that in a matter of minutes, you’d lose your spot. But then again, I’m not in America, now am I? Since we were just here yesterday, I could have done that and we would have had a great place to stay and look at the fireworks. I’ll definitely have to remember this so I can get a good spot next year, right before I leave Japan. I think that will be a good time to leave, sometime in August next year, so I can enjoy another horrible summer, but maybe I might leave earlier to travel a little bit more. Anyways, we found a place at Yamashita Park. We didn’t get a wonderful place, but it was good enough to get a good view. We were sitting on the bars next to the sidewalk near the Hotel New Grand. It was the barrier of the sidewalk to the grassy area. We didn’t get a chance to sit at the grassy area, but rather on the bars.

We were looking for another spot and I got hungry and ate at a Hot Dog stand. I was under the impression that we were all going to have dinner together, but they had all finished their dinner before I had arrived, so I was the only one left hungry at this point in time. I finished two of them, which were quite expensive. 300 yen each and they weren’t that big either. I had a cheese dog and a chili dog. We went back to the original place and sat there for a few hours talking before the fireworks started, we weren’t able to find a better spot, so this had to do.

It started promptly at 7:30pm and lasted to 8:40pm, just like it was advertised. The ones in San Diego on the Fourth of July suck compared to the ones in Japan. They really know how to set off a fireworks display. I have to give it to them. I mean it’s impossible to assemble a crowd of 490,000 people in one area to watch fireworks. And the one in Yokohama isn’t even near the largest either. From what I saw last year, I was just amazed and flabbergasted because there were so much people, but I realized that it wasn’t the largest in Japan, so I wasn’t impressed anymore. But still, that’s a lot of people.

I’m planning to go to the largest display next month, actually August 6th near the Edogawa River. The attendance at that display is approximately 1,390,000 roughly the total population of the 7th largest city in America, which would be San Diego. Could you imagine all the people in San Diego crowded up in Balboa Park to watch fireworks? I can’t but I will see it next month. I didn’t know that there was enough space to accommodate such a display since that’s just a lot of people. I can’t even imagine it. I really have to go see it in person, because that’s just freaking crazy.

I didn’t arrive home till around 10:30pm and then took a shower and finished packing. I decided to use EK’s bag again and probably for the last time because I’m going to buy a new one when I get back. I’m not happy with using his. It’s not easy to carry and it looks old and it smells funny. And I’ll have a new day bag too, so I’ll be happy about that, if I could find one in time. I will need another bag for when I go to Hakone next month with the 7th grade. I don’t really need a big one, but something that will be easy to carry around and enough for suits and casual clothes.

I need to sleep because tomorrow I need to get up at 4:30am to get to the airport by 7:30am. So I’ll do my best to update while I’m in Okinawa, I hope the hotel has a computer in the lobby, but I highly believe that they won’t and I won’t have the time to use it even if they did. It looks like I will have a nice, relaxing time while I’m there so I’m excited about it. I’ll post more when I’m back from Okinawa, even though I’ll be extremely busy when I get back.