Octopus Balls and Tired Feet

The last week or so, I've been waking up really early, probably because my apartment faces east and gets like an oven as soon as the sun comes up. Yesterday, I woke up at about 5:30....which doesn't fit my theory at all since the sky still looked like this:


Anyway, for whatever reason, I woke up at 5:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. And so began a very long day of randomness.

Monday through Wednesday of this week are a Japanese holiday called Obon. During Obon, people believe that the souls of their ancestors come back to earth for a few days. Many people go back to their parent's house, eat special food, and visit their family's grave to honor their ancestors. (I tried to ask where my grandma's soul would go. Do the souls of non-Japanese people or Japanese-American people come back to earth too? Would my grandma's soul come back to her grave in Seattle? To her house? To her relatives' house in Okinawa? Nobody really seemed to know. Anyway, it was interesting to think about it.)

Many towns also have festivals for Obon with food and traditional dancing, and in my town, the festival's organizational committee happens to be run by.......my softball team! One of the softball men called me yesterday afternoon and asked if I would make food at one of the booths, so I rode my bike over to the festival to help out.

In the middle of this little park, they had set up this tower thing with a drum inside:


and tents with grills and deep-fryers to make soba noodles, fried chicken, french fries, udon, and octopus balls.


I was given my very own apron and towel and recruited to work at the octopus ball grill where I greased grills, poured batter, sprinkled cabbage and bits of octopus, and turned balls for three hours. It was fun to learn something new, but reeeallly hot behind the grill.

Meanwhile, lots of people from town came to the festival dressed in yukatas (a kind of light summer kimono) and danced in a circle around the tower like this:


Sorry, I'll have to work on my taking-pictures-in-the-dark skills, but oh well. The blurriness gives it character. :)

After the festival, there were some raffle prizes leftover so the whole kitchen staff was invited to draw tickets. Curiously, everyone drew prize number 4, which happened to be three boxes of tissues, and on top of that, everyone decided to give their tissues to me. I'm pretty sure that unless I catch pneumonia and am sick in bed every day until I leave Japan, I won't use 21 boxes of kleenex by myself, but they insisted on giving them to me so I graciously accepted them. :D

After the raffle, we grabbed some udon:

(Me and the first baseman, who gave me an apron from his sake factory.)

and then the softball men went off to the community center to have a post-festival party. We were sitting at the table snacking and chatting when the first baseman and the manager decided they wanted to go to a public bath and invited me to come. On one hand, it was already 11 PM and I had been up since 5:30 that morning, but on the other hand, I was pretty sweaty and greasy from grilling octopus balls, so I decided to take them up on it.

By now, I've gotten over the weirdness of bathing naked with a bunch of people I've never seen before, but I still don't quite understand the social side of the public bath thing -- lots of people go to the bath with friends or their family for fun, but of course, men and women have separate baths so they can't really hang out together. It doesn't seem like the best way to have a group outing. At any rate, last night, the two softball men went to their bath, I went to mine, soaked for awhile and met up again an hour later. The water felt really nice after standing in the hot octopus ball booth all day. I guess last night's bath was less about bonding and more about sweaty, tired feet. That was cool with me.