Hanami
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2002
1
24
40
Trip End
May 15, 2004
As I said last week, Hanami is the Japanese tradition of getting extremely drunk in the park while sitting under cherry blossom trees and stuffing your face with food. With that in mind, Bill and Satsuki and I headed out for Himeji, which has the beautiful castle as well as a park filled with cherry blossom trees. We took the train from Osaka for about 1.5 hours and then stopped at the store to grab some beer and picnic food. The scene was great, the huge entrance park was lines with Sakura trees and hundreds of people were in the middle park area drinking and eating and dancing and having a great time. probably the best part of hanami is that the Japanese people really tend to let loose and just enjoy life. It's a great time to meet some new people and just have fun! After our picnic, we decided to head towards the castle to look at the trees and for a better view of the castle mixed in with the blossoms. Pretty much we just cruised the park, took many photographs, and chatted. Himeji Castle is always beautiful, but the addition of the cherry blossoms all around really afforded us some great photo opportunities and we definitely took advantage! So after a few hours we took the train back to Osaka and decided to go to Shukugawa area, which is one of the wealthiest areas in Osaka. Shukugawa has a great riverside park also lined with sakura trees. The area is lit up at night so it gave us a chance to not only see the cherry blossoms in a different light, but it also gave us reason to continue drinking and have another picnic! Shukugawa had a more vendor/carnival feel to it, but it was still highly enjoyable. We saw quite a few coworkers and the partying continued on into the night and everyone had a fantastic time!
