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So yesterday and today is festival time in Osaka.  Yesterday was the pre-carnival carnival and today is the carnival.  We went to the pre-carnival one last night which was a lot of fun.  It took us a long time to find it as it wasn`t in the city centre.  We eventually found it after taking directions from a elderly three foot midget from Osaka who even Reiko towered over.  

It was very colourful and very similar to the Chinese new year version with dragons and the like parading around whilst young maidens with colourful parasols dressed in ancient kimonos dance along in formation to drums and cries of SOLAY.  These people do this for three hours in thirty three degree heat, which is very impressive.   After we had had as much SOLAY as we could take, we went to karaoke for half an hour which cost four quid each for half an hour but with as much free drink as you could take.  Ahahahaha!

Today I went to the beach with Tommy and the family whilst Reiko took her TOEIC exam.  It is an exam for English which you need to have if you want a job speaking English.  She said she hasn`t done very well as it was very quick fire and it was hard to keep her  concentration up but I reckon that she is employing typical Japanese modesty and she has done fine.  I know she can speak English well enough.  She won`t find out for forty days though.  She`s also got her job interview tomorrow and is feeling a bit stressed. Awwww.  Good luck Reiko. 

At the beach we went shell collecting again.  Tommy brought along the scuba gear and cunningly enough a full on five foot long fishing spear complete with sharp prongs for spearing fish with.  He takes it very seriously indeed.  I think its the male hunter gatherer thing.  Once again my fish catching and shell locating abilities left a lot to be desired but I did manage to locate a rather nice pair of sunglassses for myself which I think is much more impressive than a couple of miniscule salty shells.

After the beach (and as according to tradition) we went to the game centre in order to play arcade pachinko.  The samurai pachinko machine which I have previously mentioned and which had given me so much success in the past today I felt was laughing at me.  I would get the left and right slots aligning and on to the crazy Japanese aninmation but then these always went wrong.  The samurai`s assistant would pull down the wrong symbol from the attic or the ancient guitarist`s guitar strings would break or the woman fanning the symbols along would run out of steam and collapse.  As you can imagine this would result in much banging and a large amount of English swear words.  But today I was defeated. And sunburnt.