Ok, so I was gonna wait a little while to post about this due to total exhaustion, but I was so thrilled about today I just couldn't wait to share it with all of you! Ie island was probably the best thing I have ever decided to just up and do... and did I mention I did this entirely alone! I was so proud of myself!!
There were quite a few things we did on our little trip to the isle, so I am gonna break them each into their little posts. I don't know why I started with the lillies since they were the last thing we saw, but... here they are. We were told that there are over 1 million lillies brought into the festival every year. They are not grown here, but are cultivated on main land Oki I think in Nago, and are brought over to Ie. The purpose of this... you guessed it: TOURISM! Yay for money coming to the island!!
So back to the lillies... they went with a white theme this year, so there were just tons of flowers everywhere. There were so many, all you could smell was their sweet scent. It was amazing. It was a windy day, so it was smellin' pretty darn nice.
At the festival were numerous booths set up with local foods and BIRU!! Yay for beer!! There was Orion as far as the eye could see and smothered with ice... yummy. Top that off with a little tempura green onion and some crazy little friend dough balls stuffed with squid, (which I didn't know at the time of purchase...) and I was a happy little camper.
They had a few performances while we were there and once of them were two girls playing music. They had one young girl on the drum and another playing the little traditional Japanese Habu snake-skin guitar. It was exactly the kind of music you'd expect from Japan, just beautiful. I couldn't understand a single word, but they were short little songs and I kind of like to think of them as little Haiku's put to music... but really, I have no idea what they were singing about. It coulda been "kill the Americans" and I still would have clapped at the end!
To top off my super sensory overload, this lily festival was set on the edge of some cliffs overlooking the ocean. This wasn't just any ocean, but the most beautiful sapphire blue, seafoam green, and emerald water I have ever seen. You could take a little path down towards where the water met the cliffs if you wanted a bath. I opted to stay back quite a ways where I still got splashed by the mist of the larger waves. It was breath-taking. We were about 20 feet about the water, and you can see by one of the pics that the waves crash at least 20 feet over a 6-foot guy... pure awesomeness!
So what have we learned from this little post... Lily Fest + Orion Beer + Ocean = Happy Happy Me!
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