The Japanese Festival is one of my favorite events at the Missouri Botanical Garden. St Louis is really lucky to experience a festival the size of the one at the MBG. Houston has a great Japan Fest, but it is nowhere near the size of ours.
I went twice this year, and went with my parents on the first day - and made it for the opening ceremonies - something we'd never done. There's announcements, introductions and the ceremonial breaking of the sake barrel. Presiding over the ceremonies were the newly minted President of the Garden (and he'd only been wearing that title for about 3 days), Charlie Dooley and Mayor Francis Slay.
The St. Louis Osuwa Taiko performed at the ceremonies as well.
And I got to watch the sushi people making sushi:
We didn't stick around forever because we were hungry and we'd had plans to hit up another Labor Day weekend festival: The Greek Festival.
It's more about really amazingly good food (I stuffed myself silly on pastitsio, spanikopita and tiropita) and less about the photo opportunities. The best pictures I took was the one in the church parking lot:
Somehow this amused me.
We weren't the only festival-hoppers: I got to shake hands with Mayor Slay who was making the rounds there as well.
There'll be a post about Sunday's trip back to the Japanese Festival - where I got to visit more events - including ones I'd never seen.
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