Balloons!!

In SAGAAAAAAA!!!!!! (Note, SAGA must always be written in all caps, I decided that on Sunday, it is now by law, SAGAAAAAAA!)

Annyways, on Sundey, me, David and the 3-piece rhyme gang Floe, So & Saeko (see all their names rhyme!!) All jumped in Saekos redlight running car and headed down (kinda) to SAGA to meet the Canadian Sam for some balloon action at the annual Balloon festival.

train-times are fun-times

After parking in SAGA and getting on a train we eventually got off at the special temporary station at the ballon festival. There is a station on the train line that they only open for one week year when the festival is on, cool huh? First impressions were, lotsa people, lotsa yakitori/yakiniku/beer/okinomiyaki/omiyage, but hey, wheres the balloons???? After an initiall walk around there still seemed to be no ballons insight but there was meant to be some sort of "key race" happening later so we figured we might see some balloons

come get yer souvenirs!!!

what the hell??!!!!

3:30 rolls round and the uber-hyper Japanese annoucer dudes on the megaphone announces that the key race will be starting "hurrah!". So basically it went like this: theres this big long field with about 6-8 big ass cardboard keys hung up on 20 foot high poles along it, and the dudes in balloons take off prob a couple of km away and try to take the right wind and whatnot and come down at the right time so that they can pass by one of the poles and grab one of the keys. Sounds super hard and it was, with the first 5 or so attempts failing by a few miles or so it seemed like the balloonists quests for the magical keys were fruitless. But they obviously had judged the wind wrong cos the next dudes came way more closererer and finally some dudes got one!!! Wow!! he must have won a million dollars or something!!!! No. The genki annoucer announced that they had just won themselves a nice windbreaker jacket. Wow. Thanks grandma. Anyways, thereb were better prizes, like the $(US)7000 car, wicked, what kinda car is worth $7000???? A 1993 Honda Civic?? Anyways apart from the decidely lame prizes the poor balloonist dudes got, once things got going it was kinda exciting and there were about a million balloons flying around everywhere close as to the ground/crowd/each other which was kinda cool.

Almost got the key!

Balloooooons!!!!!!!!!

lots of balloons!!

close balloons!!!

daijobu desu ka???

After that we were all kinda buggered after having stood up all afternoon so food was on the agenda. I got myslef one of the ever-famed "Sasebo Burger"s which was pretty good, but I think "Karatsu Burger" was better, man do I missed Burger Fuel..... After that we kinda missed the night time balloon thingy so we headed off home and dadadada dunno how to finish so Im just gonna say dadadadada ballooners are cool, even cooler than ravers........

ps, oh my god, my mouth is literally watering after looking at the Burger Fuel website....