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Last weekend, we went to the Summer Festival in Nakameguro with a group of friends, to watch Japanese dances, some traditional and some more modern ones. Let’s be honest though, the dances were fun but the festival atmosphere is always the draw for me… There are always big crowds, but it’s perfectly organised (the Japanese way :-); there are food stalls serving all sorts of tasty stuff and stores selling beers and other drinks on the street. This time, we came across something I’d never tasted before: Ichiban Shibori Frozen Nama (frozen beer). It’s so funny, they serve a normal beer in a plastic cup and then add a frozen beer head on the top. So the frozen beer looks like a beer combined with a 99 cone!  Interesting… The foam is extremely bitter but the mix of the foam and the beer is quite delicious!

Video of the frozen beer making process:

 

In Japan, the month of June and the start of July are what’s called “Tsuyu” or rainy season. It’s considered a bad time for tourism, obviously, but it actually does not rain everyday. Fortunately, this year’s been pretty descent; we still had a few days of rain here and there, but they weren’t too bad.

I love photographs of the rain, but it’s pretty hard to photograph the rain; I tried a lot and got a few interesting shots with my iphone. This week’s “photo of the week” is a photo of a man on his bicycle, carrying an umbrella while waiting at the train crossing near our house. It’s not an unusual sight when you live in Japan, to see people riding a bicycle while holding an umbrella; some even manage to text on the top of that! It must be what’s called “Japanese efficiency”…

Other photos on this theme.

Eager to immerse myself into the culture, I recently started downloading Japanese apps on my phone. I mean, this is also a cultural experience, right? Following my friends’ advice, I downloaded the popular weather app, ‘Line Tenki’. Seriously, I did not know looking at the weather forecast could be so much fun… Not only does it give you the forecast for the day in a super cute way, using the great Line characters in specific situations that illustrate today’s weather, but it also tells you whether today’s a good day for laundry or if you’d better accept that today’s going to be the perfect day to listen to the beautiful sound of rain. Below is a slideshow of the weather forecast on random days…

The shuugi bukuro, or money envelope, is an envelope that is used to give money gift in Japan. They are the standard for weddings and funerals, but different envelopes are used and the ways to put the money in the envelope and to fold them are different, whether it’s for a wedding or a funeral. You can see that, as a foreigner, there are great risks to do a faux pas…

Here is what a shuugi bukuro looks like:

Inside the wedding shuugi bukuro, there is another simple envelope in which the money must be inserted; for weddings, the money must be inserted in a way that the face of the man on the bank note is towards the opening of the envelope:

For funerals, it’s the opposite!!!

Then, you write your name and address on the front side of that envelope and then insert it into the shuugi bukuro, again, in a very specific way, with the top part (A) inside the bottom part (B). For funerals, it’s the opposite! So, it’s really easy to make mistakes!

We received the one below from our very good friend, Rena, when we came back to Japan, as a wedding present! It’s so beautiful that I decided to keep it and frame it… I am probably doing a faux pas, there!

There are many different designs for the shuugi-bukuro, here are a few that I thought were nice:

And Japan would not be Japan if there wasn’t a Hello Kitty version!

We had visitors in May and decided to take them to the Nezu temple where is held the Azalea flower festival. As part of the entertainment plan, there were “taiko” players (drummers) outside the temple.