nagasaki lantern festival

this weekend, lisa & i went to nagasaki on a bus tour. it was tiring but a lot of fun!
we woke up early saturday, caught the train to kokura, and then got on a bus to nagasaki. the ride was about 2 hours long. from my experience in nagasaki, i learned that they are famous for castella cakes, champon (fancy saimin), sara udon (cake noodle), and kakuniman (kayuk).
going on a japanese bus tour is an experience in itself. everything is done very... well, japanese. for example, there is 1 driver (doraiba-san) and 2 guides (gaido-san). the 2 guides are both ladies who wear these uniforms with hats. and at the front of the bus, they made a map (well, i really liked this) that shows nagasaki prefecture and there is a line drawn in red and 1 in green for the route we take going and coming. the map also has cute lanterns all over it. and then (this is the best part), the gaido-san has a stick with a hand attached to the end, and the hand has 1 finger pointing so that they use it to point to the map and explain where we're going. also, the hand had red fingernails and a bandaid on the pointing finger. what, did it get a paper cut or something? also, we had to wear these pink buttons with a "D" on it, and then the gaido-sans would hold up a matching sign outside the bus so you could find your bus easily.
anyway, the first place we went was to an outlet mall. it looked just like waikele! and later we found out that it is the same owner as waikele so.. ahhh... naruhodo (i see)
next we went to a factory where they make some kind of castella cake. we got to see them making it and got to taste it too, but this particular one was kind of weird. it wasn't the normal castella cake.. it had things in it. what kind of things? i don't know but it was a little strange. later though, we went to another place that sold castellas and they had all these flavors like honey castella and chocolate.. and those were REALLY GOOD.
at night, we went to the lantern festival, which was very cool. aside from regular hanging lanterns, there are lots of figures, like animals, or people, made out of cloth and lit from the inside, and i guess those are "lanterns" too (please check out the photos and you'll see) it was SO CROWDED! after that we went to an "all you can eat sushi dinner" but it was a little different... it was more like chinese dinner with the lazy susan in the middle but not really chinese food (it was "sara udon", orange chicken, fish-shiso tempura, and miso soup). plus you could go up to get sushi as much as you want except there were only 2 kinds... kajiki (marlin) and hirame (flounder).
on the second day, first we went on a boat "cruise", which was an hour around nagasaki bay. some neat things to see although the narration was all in japanese = we didn't know what we were looking at most of the time. after that though, the main thing we did was go to this ... dutch? park-thing. ?? i don't know how to explain it. it was an agricultural park/dutch village/totoro forest/amusement area. again, please check out the pictures and you'll say ahhh, naruhodo. i liked that place, it was really peaceful up there.
anyway, we had a lot of fun and saw lots of cool stuffs! :)