岡崎花火大会２０１２：Okazaki Fireworks Festival 2012

So after Shinrabanshow, the visual kei fest, we spent a little bit more time in the Okazaki / Nagoya area.

And on Saturday night, there was the yearly Okazaki fireworks festival. Last year, I went in yukata with some friends, and it was super fun! So I was excited to go back with Guillaume and different friends this year.

Rachael came in from Gifu, Miho came in from Nagoya, and we met up with Carine and went over to the house of one of her boyfriend's friends for a bar-b-que.

The view of the fireworks from their mini backyard was wonderful, the people were super super nice (and the friend was super into punk, so we got to giddily talk about that for a while - I really don't know how I'm going to separate myself from Japan and being able to see Japanese music live whenever I want), and there was even a bit of vegan food!

I was really happy that we were able to watch them from a yard, because otherwise the area was so crowded there was barely room to walk, much less sit.

There were also quite a few kids there, so they had lots of small fireworks set up for us to do. There's this one that's apparently super popular in Japan and just sort of hangs down and only gets bright towards the very end. Of course, though, my lit part managed to always fall off and die before the very end, so I never got to see mine looking cool. :-(

The next day we decided to head into Nagoya for the day - despite it being Guillaume's 3rd time in Japan (and second time in Okazaki), he'd somehow never been to Nagoya.

We went over to check out the castle, which I also had somehow never been to before. I was happy to finally go.

We were unfortunately a little bit rushed, because we got there quite a bit later than we had originally planned and we had to meet up with Miho and Will for lunch, but it was still cool.

The gardens were really beautiful, and there was actually a lot of cool stuff to see both inside and outside the castle. There also seemed to be some sort of festival going on, so there were lanterns set up everywhere. It was really beautiful.

Then we met up with Miho and Will for lunch.

We of course had to do purikura - it was Guillaume's first, and I think he really enjoyed it.

We had a good time hanging around Sakae before heading over to Osu Kannon.

I spend a LOT of time in both of those areas, so it was cool to get to show Guillaume - I didn't really get the feeling that he was all that impressed, though. I thought it was especially cool this time, because there was a cosplay festival going on.

I still can't really figure out if this was a girl or a guy

We saw TONS of people dressed up in every possible anime costume imaginable. I literally had NEVER seen that many cosplayers gathered in one place, even when I went to the cosplay festival in France.

And with that, the end of our time in the Aichi area. 以上です。