Nagasaki Lantern Festival

Today was the last day of the Nagasaki Lantern Festival and after several thwarted attempts to go, me and a friend finally got tickets with nothing holding us back. The Lantern Festival is held in downtown China Town of Nagasaki and held in celebration of the Chinese New Year. Being the year of the dog, there were several out and about. I've never seen so many long haired dachshunds in my life. We got dropped off at the end of the plaza where we watched a parade starting the days events. This little show took a while to complete but only because they took one step every 3-5 seconds. Our schedule of events had a dragon dance going on at the other end of the arcade in about 20 minutes, neither of us knew where we were heading so we followed the given map as best as we could. What luck we had when we all but gave up we see the dragon moving down the street at a high rate of speed. We followed it to Kofukuji Temple where the show took place. The performers made the dragon come to life and performed several little dances and got called back for what we believed to be encores.

The next show were some Chinese Acrobats doing their thing in a park that was back towards our starting point. So with our poorly drawn map and some keen eyesight (good job Kim!!) we found Chuo park. By the time we had arrived it was nearly dark and all the lanterns were lit up and very remarkable in their creativeness. We watched several acts of the little acrobats from them climbing all over each other while spinning plates in the air, to contorting their bodies while balancing candlesticks on the palms of their feet. Pretty painful to watch actually.

After the show we walked back to the arcade and walked through the exquisitely decorated streets and visited the many shops and vendors gathering mementos of the yearly celebration. Even the cold couldn't keep us from having one of the best experiences so far while being in Japan. There are many more pictures of the days events on my other page.