I spotted this ad from WAttention one day stating that they were looking for participants in the Kawagoe Festival (Matsuri). I immediately applied because they provided the transport to Kawagoe from either Takadanobaba or Shinjuku station. Plus in this festival, we would get to pull the huge floats.
It's definitely not something that I would easily get to experience. So I was really happy to get selected and I invited K to join me for this event.
We met up with the staff members and other participants at Takadanobaba station. There we received our staff pass and Seibu rail pass, which we could use for both our ride to and from Kawagoe.
While waiting for the other participants to arrive, I spotted this Claire's pop up stall and decided to check out some of their Halloween items.
Once at Kawagoe, we were led to the meet up spot before we were given 3 hours of free time to explore the area.
Once out of the station, we could already see many stalls!!!
And there were sooo many people on the streets~
No surprises there I guess as this is the largest festival in Kawagoe!
Besides food stalls, there were also many stages like these with live performances, as well as floats that were being pulled by different groups of people.
K and myself
This is probably the most traditional post office I've seen~
During our 3 hour free time, we went around the area in search of food
I bought a quail egg kushikatsu. Delicious~
There was also a ghost house there
I also tried the pork yakiniku. While it was expensive, it was good~
The streets there are closed off to cars for the floats and the food stalls.
It's just crazy because there were so many floats on display and at the same time, there were many people on the streets!
Every where you look, there's something going on
Here, you can see a Tengu resting
After that, we all grouped together again to collect our Happi coat~
We're all getting ready to pull the Kawagoe-shi float
A new friend that we met there who's from Canada
This is the Kawagoe-shi float that we had to pull~
All the floats that were on display at this festival are all different and are represented by different cities.
All the participants from WAttention
In action~ :D
At night, the lanterns on the float lit up. An interesting thing I've noticed is that every time 2 float meet, they will have to stop and greet each other.
A group picture with everyone
After the festival, we quickly left the area because it was extremely packed! There were more people at night that in the day. It was difficult to walk even because there were just too many people. Hence, it was hard to get food.
We decided to take the train back to Tokyo before getting dinner.
We ended in Onyasai (しゃぶしゃぶ温野菜) because it was cold and we were hungry.....what better than an all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu~
Website: http://www.onyasai.com/
What a great day~ An amazing new experience and a great end to the day with delicious shabu -shabu.
If you do eat there, get their onyasai ice which is vanilla ice cream topped with syrup and kinako~!! Really good!
