Tonami Tulip Fair 2015

Golden week is coming up, and lucky for us this year the string of holidays gives us a five day weekend.  It also gave us a holiday wednesday which we used to go to the Tonami Tulip Fair. Events like this in Japan always impress me; there’s so much planning and detail that go into everything. The park is huge, with different sections like the huge fields of flowers, the river, and a little couple-y photo-op area. It also happened to be really hot yesterday, reminding me to mentally prepare for the upcoming heat of summer.

I tried tulip ice cream and “deep sea salt” or something ice cream from Uozu. They were both pretty good, the tulip flavour tasted a little like grass but it was sweet and light. They also had a white shrimp flavour. We contemplated buying it just to see what it was like but in the end actually enjoying ice cream won out.

We also got to see a bit of the dancing. The dancers are divided into groups from different areas of the city and each wear a specific ukata. Like last year we joined in the dancing. Or should I say, tried to dance… we weren’t very good.

 

Tulip Mania: Endless Tulips at Tonami’s Annual Festival!

There’s no shortage of festivals in Japan, and one of my favourites so far was the Tonami Tulip Festival that I went to yesterday, made possible by a civic holiday! The ride out by train took almost two hours, but like always the journey there is part of the fun. I was amazed at how large the park is, filled with plenty of photo opportunities, souvenirs, and performances.
There was a small river running through the park, and we passed by groups of people playing in the river blowing bubbles and swirling petals around in the water.

Later in the afternoon the park was full of several hundred dancers- and they performed to music over the speaker system. One of the ladies noticed us trying to follow along and pulled us into the group- which was a little embarrassing but incredibly fun! I chatted with one of the ladies who told me there was a total of 21 different groups from different areas of Tonami, and each had a different Yukata. It was really beautiful to see the dance through the sea of tulips, and cute to see little kids participating too.