Shinpara Matsuri

As Matsuri season winds on in the immediate area, Shinpara, the community I live in held their wildly popular matsuri last night and tonight. Here you can see all 10 people from the community came out, so it was a great success!
No actually, Shinpara is a pretty far spread out community that is split into smaller areas, each of which has their own Yattai- or Japanese style parade float. Here you can see 4 of them, though sadly none of my yattai pictures came out very well.
You can also see the local shrine (dark, but it's in the background here), where Ritsy had to dig into her wallet so that we can offer some money in order to pray. Don't worry! It's not that much, I think 5 yen is an optimal offering, though we could only find a pair of 10 yen pieces.
Though her family don't live there now- she grew up with her friend Manami (you may recall they visited us, and we visited them previously) in the area. So we ran into her and Shogo and Eiho, their dad was drinking with Manami's parents, so we didn't see him. They were all happy to see me of course, and the two boys challenged me to a race. It's tough to teach kids such valuable lessons, but naturally I had to beat them! Sadly today my legs were soar from all the running...

You can see how big Ritsy's stomach is getting now- junior - or kicky-kins as I have started calling it, is definitely almost ready to come out!

On a sad note, we were given notice of a wake and a funeral in our neighborhood today. The man, aged 37, leaves behind a wife and young child. He was an avid motorcyclist and had gone for a trip up to nearby Toyohashi and lost control of his bike and was hit by a truck. Very sad. I had met him not too long ago too. He was at the Dainenbutsu practice I had gone to see- I remembered him as being quite nice. I guess the thing that struck me the most about it is his young age (just 2 years older than Ritsy and I), seems that side of life has decided to start taunting us now...