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Such fleeting beauty. The National Cherry Blossom Festival ended last weekend, signaling the end of the blossoms. My friend and I headed to D.C. to check out the 2008 Sakura Matsuri, a street festival that usually starts after the end of the Cherry Blossom Parade and stretches across a couple blocks in the heart of downtown D.C. featuring various events going on through the whole street festival (Lists from the National Cherry Blossom Festival website):

1. Arts & Crafts is an introduction to Japan’s traditional culture
2. J-POP Land features popular Japanese culture such as anime (animation), manga (comics), J-POP music, and Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)
3. The popular Taste of Japan features 15 Japanese and Asian restaurants, plus two Kirin Beer Gardens and a Hakutsuru sake tasting area
4. The Ginza Marketplace features Japanese and other products for sale

Plus five live performance stages:

1. Pennsylvania Avenue Stage - Japanese traditional music and dance, koto, and the exciting taiko drums, sponsored by All Nippon Airways and WASH-FM
2. Martial Arts Stage - Aikido, jujitsu, sumo, karate, kendo, kyudo
3. 12th Street Stage - BIG 100.3 hosts “Super Karaoke”
4. J-POP Stage- Featuring Japanese popular music and anime from Japan
5. Okinawa Stage - Featuring performers from Japan’s southern-most island.

It was pretty fun! LOTS of people were there. When it was around lunch time, the lines for food stretched a couple blocks, lol. Speaking about food, it was pretty good! I had some Japanese curry and gyu-don (beef bowl over rice). I wanted to get some tako yaki (kind of like fried octopus, it’s pretty awesome), but they sold out by the time I got back to the food vendors, which was nearing the end of the festival.

The beer garden was nice! I get few chances to drink out in public like that! Prices were reasonable too, and ahhhh…Kirin beer, yes! After a few drinks, the festival got a even more funner…like looking at all the cool things going on in the display tents and the items for sale at the Ginza marketplace (and if something was overly expensive, we’d joke about it out loud LOL). I played a little game as well, held by some Japananese travel agency I think, where you rotate this circular box full of different colored marbles which represented different prizes. I was able to get the 2nd rarest color (rarest one being red which gave you a hotel room or something), green, and got to choose to get a mug or t-shirt. I picked the t-shirt (full of japanese writings and stuff, looks pretty cool)!

There were a couple of people cosplaying, pretty cool. A couple of cute girls came out to display their kimonos!

image credit: http://flickr.com/photos/iamjenii

There were a lot of great performances also! Mitsumassyu rocked the crowd on the J-POP stage! They have nice stage presence and their songs are pretty catchy! And the lead vocal always has a cute outfit, the bass player too lol!

I was only able to catch the Kendo performance out of all the martial arts demonstrations unfortunately. It was nice to see people getting hit on the head with sticks however!

I think the highlight of the day was the Tawagama University dancers and taiko drummers….actually I think it’s the highlight every year they’ve been in it, lol! Awesome drum playing and dancing, always full of energy, great dancing style, and cool beats!

What a great way to end the National Cherry Blossom festival! I had a great time and I can’t wait until next year!

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