Bikun and boy

So after work on Saturday,I stopped by this tiny O-bon festival here in Oomori. O-bon is a japanese holiday that goes for 3 days kinda. It's hard to really describe because some places don't really celebrate it, at least here in the big city, but then some places have it in July, and some have it in August, go figure. Anyway, it was really small, but afterwards Bikun and I went for a ride to the Tama River. It's the river that seperates Tokyo-to from Kanagawa-ken. ("to" means municipality, and "ken" means prefecture) From my place it's about a 35-40 min ride, and it's not too bad, it's pretty much all flat ground, and it was a really nice ride. I headed out there because I had reports from my students that there might be fireworks along the river that evening, but either I was too late for them, or they were at a different location, either way, I wasn't too dissapointed, I really just went for the ride. I ended up at this park that is right next to the river and has many baseball fields and stuff, and there were several groups of young kids, lighting fireworks and stuff, around. I couldn't really go right down next to the river because along the banks of ther river is where all the homeless people have their.... well... houses. They build these little huts and stuff, and they can pack em up and move them and stuff, it's really quiet amazing ingenuity. Anyway, since it was really dark, and I couldn't tell if there was an opening for me to actually go down to the river's edge, I just hung out on the path behind the homeless' houses and drank a beer and enjoyed the evening. It was cool, but some freaky huge bugs!