Today was a great but painful day.

I helped carry a big gold statue temple kind of thing called Omikoshi around Komae for a local festival. I kindly got given traditional clothes to wear and so I felt a bit out of place considering that I was the only westerner who had them on. Actually I was the only westerner there. But everyone was extremely welcoming again and I ended jumping for the first leg of the journey, well pushed in. It took me a while to work out that I had keep in step with everyone else so the beam i was supporting didn't just keep banging on my shoulder. It felt like it pooped out of its socket about five times at the start. I was also too tall to stand up straight because otherwise I would have been taking the whole beam by myself which I definitely couldn't do. For one part of it I was surrounded by girls and shorter guys so I had to almost completely squat down to carry it. But once I got in to the rhythm of it, it was actually quite an amazing experience. Me with a group japanese guys carrying a big gold thing around. I'm definitely really glad I did it. I think I carried it around for over an hour in the end and I have the feeling my shoulders are going to hurt for days.

After the festival, we came back home to get ready for Eriko's mum's parents to come, whom I hadn't before. They were both really nice people, by the end of the night they said that they were now my Tokyo grandparents. Her grandmother is a professor of tea ceremonies and offered for me to come along to one, but I just haven't got any time to do it. Her grandmother ended up getting quite "happy" and was really really funny. I was really happy to have met them.