Azaleas Festival (2004-04-20)
This past Sunday we went to Nezu (
) for the Azaleas Festival in Nezu Jinja
(Nezu Shrine). KL went to my girlfriend's salon which is on the
street right next to Nezu Station to have his hair cut before viewing
the
flowers while I just wandered around the back streets taking
pictures. Nezu is quite well-known for its old world charm.
It still has some antique-looking houses and shops which are tucked
inside back alleys and little side streets.My girlfriend is currently back in Taiwan to visit families so they
have hired someone to help around the shop. Their salon is the
old-fashioned kind-- the kind that puts a
cylindrical light fixture with whirling red and blue lines outside the
shop-- and their clients are mostly men. When I went to the salon
to
meet KL after his haircut, my
friend's husband was very nice to leave his work behind for a short
moment and walked us to the Shrine since it was our first time there
and we might have trouble finding the way.
A big torii gate marks the entrance to the Shrine. There were
already a lot of people inside. Anytime there's a festival or
annual event in Tokyo, you can be sure there'll be a good
turnout. We didn't actually go to the
shrine area since we are not too interested in battling with praying
crowds and breathing heavily incense-filled air. We stuck to the
foreground where one can have a clear view of the endless azaleas
bushes growing on the sloped area fringing the left side of the
Shrine. For 200 yen one can walk along a winding path that cuts
through the shrubs to have a closer look at the plants. We
preferred to stay on the foreground because it's no big deal seeing
azaleas close up, there are plenty of those on the streets. We'd
rather see them in massive numbers as a big picture.
Unfortunately quite a few shrubs hadn't flowered therefore the color as
a whole was not a striking fuschia and purple as expected but somehow
washed out with a little
too much green. Nevertheless seeing it was still a nice thing to
do on a warm sunny afternoon.
We spotted a model dressed in matching color of the flowers having her pictures professionally taken beside the shrubs right in the middle of the stream of people walking the path. It looked like an impossible task because the path is too narrow for people to walk around her without blocking the photographer's view. And some people down on the ground level were busy taking pictures of the model instead of the azaleas. Somehow I doubt they were all snapping her pictures to use in their blogs like I was though.
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