Sakura Matsuri
The Cherry Blossom festival ended this weekend. Before it did I got one more event in. Saturday afternoon was the Sakura Matsuri, or cherry blossom street festival. It is put on by a local US-Japanese club. It is held on a closed down stretch of Pennsylvania avenue a few blocks from the White House. This was my first year attending.
The ride on the METRO in was not the most crowded I've ever seen it, but it was fairly close. In addition to the cosplayers and regular tourists I saw a number of people who were wearing Nationals jerseys and also DC United jerseys. So in addition to the regular weekend Cherry Blossom crowds there were people coming in for the street festival, a baseball game and a soccer game.
Still, the subway was manageable, and there wasn't a problem exiting the train car or getting out of the station. It was a short walk to where the festival was being held, and once I got there I got a look at some real crowds. I'm not sure if it is always this way but the place was jam packed with people.
The festival area is a pretty large area and Pennsylvania Ave is quite wide along this stretch. The festival also stretched up a few of the sides streets a little ways. This year there was a $5 entrance fee, and because of this they had the festival area fenced off with only certain spots where you could get in and out. In years past the festival was free and it wasn't fenced in, and that might explain why it was a little claustrophobic.
Once I got inside and started to move around I realized that the crowds weren't too terrible once you got out of the logjam in the middle. The sides of all the streets were lined with booths selling stuff and exhibiting things. They had all the food booths clustered in the middle part of the festival. This meant that the lines for food stretched completely across the street for about 50 yrds up and down the road. Once you pushed out of that area things got a little better.
Things also thinned out slowly over the course of the day, and by around 2:00PM or so it was pretty easy to get around. I had a few performances of taiko drumming that I wanted to see, but beyond that I simply wandered around and took in whatever interested me. I had seen taiko drumming on youtube a number of times, but never in person. It was pretty spectacular, but the performances I saw were a bit more restrained and formal than some of the wild flailing I'd seen on the internet. It was more of a concert band as opposed to a rock band sort of feel. It was still way cool.
I did some sight seeing among all the vendor booths selling Japanese kitsch and products. They were interesting, but nothing I wanted to buy. I got to speak for a bit with a lady who was staffing one of the larger tents selling kimonos about various costume topics. There were quite a number of people in the crowd wearing kimonos and yukata and I kicked myself a bit for not thinking of wearing one to the festival myself. It isn't like I am going to have all that many opportunities outside of LARP events to wear mine.
There was a fair number of cosplayers wandering around in the crowd, but nothing like what you would likely see at a comics or anime hotel convention. This was my first experience with this sort of thing unless you count some extremely small college conventions I attended in the late 80's. I've been out of anime for so long that other than a Mario derivative character I only recognized one of the characters that someone was cosplaying. I did recognize a couple of folks as Sailor Moon cosplayers, but I don't even know any of their names.
Towards the end I bumped into bad_grief and a husband and wife pair I know from LARP circles. They had their kid with them. The had been at the tidal basin earlier in the day, and they said the rain we got the other night washed off a lot of the blossoms. This made me quite glad I got in to see them when I did. My two friends and their kid left shortly after that but I spent a while wandering around with bad_grief. We took in a fairly short cosplay presentation and a brief bit of a J-pop concert. We looked through some more booths and ate a bit of funnel cake, and just talked and caught up with each other. Once we were tired of the festival we wandered over to the nearby national mall and sat on a bench and talked for a while longer. I had intended to finish the day off doing a few more geocaches near the Natural History museum, but those can wait for another day.
Slideshow of all the pictures I took
The ride on the METRO in was not the most crowded I've ever seen it, but it was fairly close. In addition to the cosplayers and regular tourists I saw a number of people who were wearing Nationals jerseys and also DC United jerseys. So in addition to the regular weekend Cherry Blossom crowds there were people coming in for the street festival, a baseball game and a soccer game.
Still, the subway was manageable, and there wasn't a problem exiting the train car or getting out of the station. It was a short walk to where the festival was being held, and once I got there I got a look at some real crowds. I'm not sure if it is always this way but the place was jam packed with people.
The festival area is a pretty large area and Pennsylvania Ave is quite wide along this stretch. The festival also stretched up a few of the sides streets a little ways. This year there was a $5 entrance fee, and because of this they had the festival area fenced off with only certain spots where you could get in and out. In years past the festival was free and it wasn't fenced in, and that might explain why it was a little claustrophobic.
Once I got inside and started to move around I realized that the crowds weren't too terrible once you got out of the logjam in the middle. The sides of all the streets were lined with booths selling stuff and exhibiting things. They had all the food booths clustered in the middle part of the festival. This meant that the lines for food stretched completely across the street for about 50 yrds up and down the road. Once you pushed out of that area things got a little better.
Things also thinned out slowly over the course of the day, and by around 2:00PM or so it was pretty easy to get around. I had a few performances of taiko drumming that I wanted to see, but beyond that I simply wandered around and took in whatever interested me. I had seen taiko drumming on youtube a number of times, but never in person. It was pretty spectacular, but the performances I saw were a bit more restrained and formal than some of the wild flailing I'd seen on the internet. It was more of a concert band as opposed to a rock band sort of feel. It was still way cool.
I did some sight seeing among all the vendor booths selling Japanese kitsch and products. They were interesting, but nothing I wanted to buy. I got to speak for a bit with a lady who was staffing one of the larger tents selling kimonos about various costume topics. There were quite a number of people in the crowd wearing kimonos and yukata and I kicked myself a bit for not thinking of wearing one to the festival myself. It isn't like I am going to have all that many opportunities outside of LARP events to wear mine.
There was a fair number of cosplayers wandering around in the crowd, but nothing like what you would likely see at a comics or anime hotel convention. This was my first experience with this sort of thing unless you count some extremely small college conventions I attended in the late 80's. I've been out of anime for so long that other than a Mario derivative character I only recognized one of the characters that someone was cosplaying. I did recognize a couple of folks as Sailor Moon cosplayers, but I don't even know any of their names.
Towards the end I bumped into bad_grief and a husband and wife pair I know from LARP circles. They had their kid with them. The had been at the tidal basin earlier in the day, and they said the rain we got the other night washed off a lot of the blossoms. This made me quite glad I got in to see them when I did. My two friends and their kid left shortly after that but I spent a while wandering around with bad_grief. We took in a fairly short cosplay presentation and a brief bit of a J-pop concert. We looked through some more booths and ate a bit of funnel cake, and just talked and caught up with each other. Once we were tired of the festival we wandered over to the nearby national mall and sat on a bench and talked for a while longer. I had intended to finish the day off doing a few more geocaches near the Natural History museum, but those can wait for another day.
Slideshow of all the pictures I took