Monday, March 19, 2007

SUMO WRESTLING

On 3/17/07 we went to go watch Sumo wrestling in Osaka (about 1.5 hours by bullet train from Hiroshima) with a few friends. Here I am in front of the Sumo Stadium, as you can see it was easy to identify where it was thanks to all the colorful flags outside.
Here we are in from of the Stadium, for the record we have no idea what the guy in the right hand side of the picture was doing. I think he was just there guarding the decorations...seriously.
We had a the chance to see some of the Sumo wrestlers coming in to the Stadium. Notice how huge this guy is in comparison to the people around him. Needless to say they really stand out in a crowd!!!
I tried to stop some of the wrestlers in order to take a picture but they completely ignored me, so I took a picture with my new cardboard friend. Are we a happy couple of what?
Since we got there early we had the opportunity to get up close and personal with the fighters.
Here is a good view of the ring:

I bought the box seats for this event thinking they where like the ones in Detroit's Tiger Stadium, boy was I wrong. These where our box seats. What ever happened to regular seats?
After 6 hours of sitting in our "extremely huge" space we where feeling the togetherness (since everyone's feet where numb that's about all we could feel) in our cushions as you can see below:
A total of 8 foreigners went with us to the Sumo event. We began to make bets (10 cents each fight nothing mayor) as to who would win. Orlando just picked the guys with the funniest names and then my friend would match them to the picture in the event book. If we still had no idea who was fighting we would ask our neighbors, "Who is that". We where actually very loud and would cheer hysterically for our picks. I thought "we must be quite annoying" but to the contrary, our box neighbor bought all of us ice cream and some guy sitting behind us gave a few people free beer!!! What a great country, free stuff!!!!
Here are the Sumo wrestlers in the Ring Entering Ceremony. What could be better than big men with colorful skirts?
If you want to get into Sumo then just follow these easy steps:
1. Assume the position.
2. Engage your opponent.
3. Knock your opponent down swiftly.
Now let's see that in real time:

Here they go again:
To learn more about sumo wrestling go to the information section of this site:

1 comment:

NÚRIA & DAVID said...

Después de escoger entre el trillón de fotos que tenias del Sumo te ha quedado muy bien !!!!!