This morning, the manager of the ryokan gave us a lift to the station with two Australian guys. Nothing kills a conversation like hearing "Yes I recently went to Tokyo to attend a conference on CONCRETE". What can you say? "That sounds interesting" would be obviously untrue.
We got to Kyoto in the afternoon, it was pretty rainy. Not ideal for a fire festival. But we decided to go anyway, with an umbrella borrowed from the hostel. We had to take 3 trains by 3 train companies to get there, not so easy. When we got there we had a wander around and its a pretty nice town. We got there about 2 hours early to make sure we could see it but it seems there was no point. Youre not actually allowed to stand and watch it. You have to continuously move. So after being moved on about 5 times for standing and watching the festival we looped around like they asked. Everyone had an umbrella up so it was hard to see, you got splashed a lot and poked in the face by the spokes often. It wasnt so enjoyable. So we walked down the parade route to find that we then had to loop around in a queue if we wanted to walk back up to watch the parade more. So we queued and went through again. We got to see a lot of huge heavy torches being carried around but that was pretty much it. Then we had the choice to queue and loop around again to carry on or take the road to the station. So we queued for 40 minutes and then were able to chose the path to the station. LOADs of people chose to go home rather than carry on trying to watch this poorly-organised festival. With about 300 volunteers I dont know how they got it so wrong! Oh well.
