Chinese New Year

Chinese Lunar New Year is considered one of the most important of the Chinese holidays.  It marks the end of winter and is often called Spring Festival.  This year the holiday fell on February 3rd and began the year of the Rabbit.  We decided to celebrate, so we headed to Chinatown in Yokohama for a parade.  That's right, the Americans celebrated a Chinese holiday in Japan!

There were lots of performers, big and small

a man with a pet rabbit (he wasn't actually part of the parade)

and DRAGONS, lots and lots of DRAGONS

you can see here that there is a ball on a pole that the dragon followed all through the parade

as I'm standing there taking photos, the guy with the ball comes over and hands my husband the pole and shoves him out into the street (not in an aggressive way, but a "go try it" kind of way)

then hands our friend (in the pink) the tail and off they go

they got to be IN the parade

I can't lie, it was pretty awesome!

unfortunately, we were all so stunned and it happened so quickly that no one thought to take a video =(  We tried to search you tube for "American participates in Chinese parade in Japan" but came up with nothing!

Then on our walk back to the train station, we saw this

a guy was walking his pet warthog/pig looking thing!

Another fun day in Japan!