Life's a Peach!

Greetings all! As we near the month of April, so too do we draw closer to Japan's legendary cherry blossom season. Before long, the country will be awash in sakura and fantastically drunk office workers. It'll be so beautiful...

In the meantime, dear friends, please enjoy the less-celebrated but gorgeous-in-its-own-right blooming of the peach blossoms! Unfortunately, our cameras couldn't capture the aroma of said blossoms, which was heavenly. I can't stress enough how good and sweet these things smelled. It must have been the best smell I've ever smelled. And I've smelled cake!

We got lost on the way to the gardens and stumbled across Youth Festa, a small fair operated entirely by Hiroshima's young people.  There were snacks, wares for purchase, and lots of cool dances.  Also, a giant papier mache carp.  At least, this is what a carp would look like if carp were beautiful instead of heinous.

One of the dances at Youth Festa.  We couldn't tell if the girl on the left was of African descent or just in black face.  Neither would surprise me -- Japanese people aren't out-and-out racist, but they have curious lapses when it comes to racial sensitivity.  Someday, I'll post a picture of a sign we found for an Indian curry restaurant bearing an apron-clad golliwog.  (Maybe.  If my soul will suffer me to gaze upon it again).

A tea ceremony that we were too cheap to attend.  Perhaps it was for the best -- while there was a sort of austere beauty to the proceedings, they also involved a lot of sitting perfectly still and watching the dude in the corner wipe down his ceramics set with a tiny brush.  Guess I'm not quite refined enough for what many consider the pinnacle of Japanese cultural sophistication.

Ryan decides to test out his camera's tilt-shift function.  For those who aren't Erin McConnell, tilt-shift is a photographic effect that basically makes things look all miniature and cool.  The things is, these islands were already designed to be miniatures.  So now they're like...DOUBLE MINIATURE.  (Did I just blow your mind?)

Blossoms aplenty!  The purple-ish flowers are the plum blossoms mentioned in a previous post.  The white ones are the (magnificently fragrant!) peach blossoms.

Some plum blossoms that hadn't yet fallen from their branches.  I know we're supposed to focus on the peach blossoms here, but I love the lighting in this picture.

Don't you wish you could just shove your nose right into the middle of one of these flowers and inhale until your eyes rolled back in your head?  Yes, you do!

Delicate white on somber purple.  No wonder Japanese people love their blossoms so much. :)

There's no better way to cap off a day of blossom viewing than with a little one-eyed-wolf viewing.  This guy resides in a storefront window in downtown Hiroshima.  What does this store sell?  Grievously injured taxidermy specimens, apparently.