Heck Yeah!

I can now cross `see a giant wooden penis parading down the street` from my life to-do list. Last Wednesday I went with some friends to the famous male fertility festival held at Tagata shrine, about half an hour from Nagoya. You might remember the shrine from the first group of pictures we posted... Lots of large wooden and stone phallus! This festival, known as `the penis festival` by foreigners, is very famous for visitors to Japan but not so famous with regular Japanese. This fact made it all the more interesting for me to try and describe in my classes without actually using the word penis.

It was great fun to spend an entire day in the company of drunken foreigners and REALLY old Japanese men and women. When we first arrived at the shrine we were treated to an excellent view of some paintings on wood showing all stages of the *ahem* `sexual process` in excruciating detail. It was mildly disturbing even for a　hardened Canadian like myself. My fears were put to rest when I met a friendly/crazy older man with a poodle named Hammond. Hammond and his owner happily posed for a picture in front of one of the more graphic paintings. After this we made our way into the main shrine area where there were many stalls set up selling delicious food fashioned into delightfully festive shapes! Just when I thought I had seen it all along came a tiny child eating penis shaped banana covered in chocolate... Oy!

The point of the festival was to gather everyone together to watch men carry this one GIANT wooden penis through the streets. There were also free sake `floats` and women carrying smaller peni in the parade. This made for some great pictures and videos that I`ll try to post on the web soon. The climax of the event, pun very much intended, came when large balls of really hard rice, called mochi, were thrown into the crowd by volunteers dressed in traditional robes. The aim of the game here was supposed to be avoiding getting knocked out by the rock-like balls. Considering the state of our reflexes by this time, it was a difficult task! I came away with a mochi ball and no permanent brain damage, so I was happy.

It was a great day and I was really happy that I got to witness something so different! Now I can tell people that I almost got knocked over by a giant penis.

In other useless news we had our Japanese class today. Good news is we are about to start the second textbook. Bad news is that my speaking skills are severely stunted, which proves frustrating. Today the teacher asked me to finish the sentence `I`m too nervous so therefore...` and I answered quickly thinking I was being very intelligent with `I`m too nervous so therefore I am fat`. Of coarse I totally misunderstood the question AND answer but she had a good laugh about it. I felt like the students that respond to `What`s your name?` with something equally as silly like `I like cheese`.