Yesterday, Jun and I went to a fireworks display in Misato City, which is about an hour train ride away from Kawagoe. The display wasn’t bad (more on that in picture form) but, we were disappointed on the serious lack of food. Typically at these hanabi taikais (fireworks displays/festivals) there are rows and rows of stands with all sorts of festival foods. The only food being sold was overpriced snack foods.
Anyway, we found some seats right in front of where the fireworks were going to be set off, which was pretty impressive considering that we arrived only 20 minutes before the event began. No matter how hard I tried with my digital camera, I could not get a decent picture of the fireworks. The following pictures were all taken with my cell phone.
OK, enough with the pictures and onto a video from the “grand finale” that was set to music. I have all my videos up from the fireworks display on my youtube account, so you can check out the rest of them there.
Now, I have somethings to explain because of one of my status updates. In summary, during one of the displays a whole bunch of smoke, ash, and trash from the fireworks was blown in our direction and several pieces went into Jun’s right eye. Immediately after the fireworks ended, I bought some water for him to pour over his eye to try to get the stuff out. By this point his eye was blood red, so I took him to an ambulance located at the entrance to the park. They took us inside, I filled out paperwork about Jun, while they tried several times to get the stuff out of his eye with lots of water. At first, they could not find what it was that was causing all the pain because it had gone up into his eyelids, so using water brought it down to where the paramedics could see it. One piece was pretty big and came out easily with some water, but the others were small and would not move. They spent 30 minutes “shooting” at whatever it was with water while I am sitting there thinking that this all would be over if they would just use some gauze and gently dab the spot. After another 20 minutes, they came to the same conclusion and that was that. They gave Jun a towel to take with us because his shirt was saturated at this point. His eye is fine now and no damage was done. My only regret: I did not get a picture 😦
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Oh, poor Jun! That sounds way too drawn-out and painful.
The fireworks look pretty nice, though!
It really was. I figured they were not going to listen to any advice given by the foreigner, so I just tried not to laugh at the utter ridiculous of the whole thing.
We are having problems with our eyes to a lesser degree, thank God, from all the smoke from the fire in Bonny Doon. The fire department is going to let it burn itself out in the remote areas so when the wind changes we get a lot of smoke. There were will be smoke around for the next few months–until we get our first good rain.
Glad Jun’s eye is OK–maybe you should add EMT to your list of possible careers.
Not sure I could handle being an EMT…I don’t do so good with blood and the like…