Sake Festival

Today a group of friends and us went to a Sake Festival in Saijo about 30 minutes from Hiroshima by train. Sake is alcoholic beverage brewed mainly from rice. I'm not a big fan of sake. I tried it when I was in Michigan and did not particularly like but I went to the festival anyways to give it another shot. We walked around town and went into the different sake breweries. Here are some of them:

Here we are in front of the Sake barrels:

Here I am with my sidekick Erin (she finally updated her blog check it out at: http://erinsjourneys.blogspot.com/).

There where more than 200 different brands of Sake form all the different regions in Japan. You paid $ 15 at the entrance and could order all types of sake by region and number, as many times as you wanted!!! The first one to run out was sake # 69 from the Kinki region, I assume because there where lots of foreigners that where there and found that funny. You got these tiny sake cups or a wooden box with salt on the corner (all you needed was lime and you had a Japanese margarita ready to go) as you can see below:

Even though the containers where small the people where still really drunk all over the place. Since you could not come back out people would just hang around, like this guy to your right. He was just sleeping happily in one of the park benches and absolutely nothing was going to wake him up!!!! The sad part is that he was not the only one like this, you could barely find where to sit. On our way back to Hiroshima this poor man was so drunk that every time the train stopped he would fall on top of Orlando, which he did not enjoy but it was really funny!!! Finally the drunk guy got a chair and went to sleep. In general the sake festival was like being in "El festival del Cafe" back in Maricao, (I think I went there every year when I was in PR with my family) you just had to substitute the coffee for sake.