Sakurabana festival

Each year, the cherry blossoms bloom in Okinawa before anywhere else. Brandon says we're special. :)

Saturday afternoon, we drove up north of Nago to enjoy the cherry blossoms and attend a festival.  Today's word is "sakura-bana," meaning cherry blossom. Every year, Okinawa is the first place in the world where the cherry blossoms bloom.  It's the last weekend of January, and we're almost at the end of the cherry blossom season.

Traffic on the way to Nago wasn't too bad, but once we headed through Nago towards Mount Yaedake, let's just say we got plenty of time to admire the occasional cherry trees along the road.  Fortunately, we had no specific time schedule so we were able to just enjoy the beautiful scenery and each others company.  :)

We also enjoyed seeing the many mikan stands that seemed to pop up out of the trees every so often along the road.  Mikan and tankan were being sold by the bag-full.  (Side note: I'll be devoting a post in the near future to mikan, shikuwasa, and tankan, so stay tuned.)

We also found this cute coffee shop randomly along the road.  We had plenty of time sitting in traffic to enjoy all the local scenery.

We also found this funny sign!  We weren't sure if they were trying to say "littering is prohibited from atop large triangles" or if they were artistically saying "beware of falling rocks."  Either way, it provided some good entertainment during our wait.

As we wound our way up part of the mountain, I loved the sight of the Orion Beer lanterns strung in between the cherry blossoms.  It's iconically Japan for me.

Once we found a festival near Mount Yaedake and a parking lot with available parking, we called our mission complete.  We'll plan on hiking some of Mount Yaedake another time, when there is plenty of parking and a whole lot less people.  :)  The cherry blossoms were beautiful!  There were many games for children and lots of yummy festival food to be enjoyed by all!  We were on a hunt for yakisoba for Brandon.

We ate our dinner under a cherry tree (and beside a giant inflatable koala.)  Our menu consisted of:

A combination of yakisoba and okonomiyaki.

Delicious teriyaki chicken on a stick.

And some dessert we hadn't seen before.  It reminded us of thick pancakes with a vanilla pudding-like filling in between.  I was even more excited when we found one of these with An filling (the sweet red bean paste I adore but usually only find on mainland Japan!)  Oh yeah!  That's what I'm talking about!  Good stuff!

There was a large, beautiful mural at the end of the festival road.

I loved the beauty of the cherry trees.

And the beauty of the individual, dainty cherry blossoms.  So pretty!

Definitely worth the drive for the beautiful scenery and delicious festival food!  A very fun Saturday together!

---Arielle