Fireworks in Abekawa (or how I almost passed out in a crowd of 400,000

First let me say this about Japanese people, they FREAKING LOVE FIREWORKS. Dude, you can buy big bag bottle rockets in the store for like 10 bucks!!! So the now let me set the scene. The plan was that after work on Saturday that Hitomi, here sister and myself would head from Shizuoka city (where I work) by bus to Abekawa. Which was less than 5 miles away. After I inhaled a store bought plate of tuna sushi and downed a bottle of something called Calpis (yes it does sound like cal-piss) but I swear it is the drink of the gods! We hopped on a bus that was PACKED and started the 5 mile journey. I say journey because it took like 25 FREAKING min. to get there. I kept thinking we could have walked and gotten there faster! But live and learn right? Once we got to Abekawa (it seemed like down the block), I could see a river of people. It looked like river no lie. There were fast moving parts of the crowd and there were pools of people just standing around. The river of people, as I came to find out later, was about 400,000 people "deep".
It was still very humid and warm that evening to begin with but, once we started to get closer to the crowd I could feel the temperature rise. I was already dripping sweat on the bus ride to Abekawa and this made it that much worse. I could smell the crowd, the funk of 399,999 other people not just me! As we "waded" through the crowd I must have bumped into and stepped on at least 30 people in a span of about 2 min.
The fireworks were impressive, and that is a big understatement. I didn't see the entire hour and 30 min of fireworks but what I saw in the 40 min was better than all the firework shows that I have seen in all my life put together. There were showers of green, blue, purple, and gold exploding every 5 seconds. The sound of the fireworks could be felt in your chest. It was like a Vegas night of neon in the sky! In plain terms, it was bad-ass.
So now the downside, I was sweating so much that I drank about 64oz water in less than hour. It was bad, I don't do well in the heat and I do even worse in the humidty. There were many times when I thought my knees might buckle, I was really really dizzy. And no it was not from looking up at the fireworks!! It was uncomfortable and down right miserable! I kept bumping into people and I know I stepped on at least one little kid. I felt so bad.
Overall it was OK. I will really have to think twice about going to another fireworks show here in Japan. My advice to anyone else thinking about going to a firework show in Japan.....get there early.
By the way the firework show was on Saturday. I know that this update is way late but you know what? It's my site and sometimes I'm lazy. But I promise to get better about updating!
Next blog....I get deep and philosophical (did I spell that right?) Oh one last thing if you read this blog, I like feed back good, bad, or otherwise!! Tell what you like, don't like, anything.