天神祭り Tenjin Festival

On Wednesday July 25th the Tenjin Festival took place in Osaka City. The summer festival is one of the biggest in Japan and there were roughly 500,000 people there for the festival. The festival takes place along the river near Sakuranomiya. There are all the usual food stalls and game booths and an hour long aerial fireworks display like many other festivals have. The thing that is unique to this festival is the parade of boats along the river. It is much like a normal parade with decorated floats, music and celebrities but this one is all on boats floating up and down the river.

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The other thing that is really cool about this festival is that lots of people wear a yukata, which is a light cotton version of the traditional kimono worn in summer time. Probably about half of the women were wearing yukata and a decent amount of men as well. The yukata have really beautiful designs and colors and makes the whole festival feel much more traditional. For this festival I even decided to wear a yukata!

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I felt a little odd being a foreigner wearing traditional Japanese clothes but it was really fun and I overheard lots of people commenting that I looked cool. The yukata is like a bath robe so its really comfortable and there are pockets in the underhand of the sleaves which are convenient for carrying things. The only problem was that I have really big feet (31cm) and the biggest geta slippers that I could find were only 28cm so my feet were hanging off the back. After walking around all night my feet were really sore by the end of the night.

I ate lots of good food and had a really good time walking around the festival in my yukata getting looks from everyone. Even though the Tenjin Festival is not all that much different from other festivals in Japan the huge number of people and the warm weather created a wonderful atmosphere and was a lot of fun.

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(From this point on I am going to start writing this blog in both English and Japanese.)

7月２５日（水）に大阪市の天神祭りがありました。天神祭りは全国でトップ３の最大祭りの中に入っています。桜ノ宮の川岸の周りに約５百万人がこの祭りに来たらしいです。祭りの食べ物やゲームや花火などがもちろんありました。でも天神祭りの特徴は船パレートです。

僕は天神祭りの好きなことは沢山の人々がゆかたを着ます。約女の人の半分がゆかたを着て、男の人も少なくないです。ゆかたはきれいな色とデザインがあって、伝統的な感じがします。今回ぼくもゆかたを着ました！

外国人としてゆかたを着るのがちょっと恥かしかったが、「かっこいいな」という声を聞こえました。ゆかたは涼しくて楽ですが、一つの問題がありました。僕は足が３１cmで一番大きなげたが２８cmですから、足は出ていました。ずっと歩いていたので、おわりに足が痛くなりました。

色々な食べ物を食べたり、ゆかたの姿で皆に見られたり、するのが本当に楽しかったです。他の祭りとあまり違わないが、大勢な人々と温かい温度が素晴らしい雰囲気で面白い祭りだと思います。