Obon. Today is the 75th anniversary celebration of Obon in Japantown. Collette and I picked up Toran & Aurelia for a day of fun, and sleep over. Toran & Aurelia brought along their yukata's to change into to be in theme for tonight's celebration.

First though, we fulfilled Collette's wish to go to the same park as her brother went with Toran and 'throw rocks' into the stream. Kids are so funny. Colin spent an hour with Toran when he was here in July, just experimenting with various rock sizes and shapes and weights and how they landed in a little creek in a shady park in Mill Valley. Collette's interest in it did not last an hour, she wanted to try what her brother did, but her interest is more in social activities like playing hide-and-go-seek. Which she promptly talked Toran and Aurelia into doing after a few rocks into the creek.

After cleaning up from the park activities, we got ready for Japantown and the much anticipated Obon Festival Dancing.

We arrived in Japantown in time for dinner, and chose Mifune, since it had the desireable "Bullet Train" dinner! Aurelia models in front of the attractive and tasty children's meal below. It consists of tempura, choice of noodles or rice, and pickles. (My mean of tenzaru soba - cold soba with tempura -- large prawns can be seen in the corner).



The kids were disappointed that the games were taken down after we finished dinner as they wanted to try the duck hunt and goldfish catching games. However, they did not go away empty handed as a child and mother beseeched us to take a bag of goldfish that they would not be able to take care of... 5 goldfish.

By this time, well, I couldn't convince the kids to dance in the festival, and it was COLD. And now, they wanted to rush the fish to Jo-Ann, because "Mom knows how to take care of the fish, and we have a fish tank!". So we left the festival, which had terrible technical difficulties with the music as well, so it was just as well we got ahead of the crowd.

The kids decided that they were cousins, since their grandmothers were both from Osaka, Japan, were related to warriors (samurai!), and shared an auntie (me).

No time to wind down, when we were almost home, Daniel called my cell phone and wanted to bring his new girlfriend over and introduce us.. I mentioned the 3 kids, but they thought it would be fun anyway. So the kids and I met Kit.

The kids finally crashed at midnight, about the time Daniel & Kit got on the road as well.