Hanami!

One of the best features of spring in Japan is the cherry blossoms. To celebrate this delightful asspect of spring, the Japanese celebrate by having Hanami parties. Hana means flower, Mi is to look/see/watch. So Hanami is a flower viewing party. Hanami parties generally involve not only lovely blossoms, but food and alcohol. So they're basically picnics. JAFCO, the new company that I work for, threw a Hanami party while my folks were here, so we all got together and went. The day of the party turned out to be cold, but the blossoms were still incredible. Here we are eating:

After everyone was done eating, there were a few special presentations by various talented people. The gentleman in this picture is blackbelt in several martial arts. He demonstrated some moves with lots of different weapons while the lady in the picture did marvelous impromptu translations.

Then a woman whose mother teaches tea ceremony walked us through that process so that we could try the matcha (yummy!) and get a rough idea of how that works:

And of course the cherry blossoms were everywhere, so Zack and I took a few of our annual cherry blossom pictures. Here's the group picture for the year:

So a good time was had by all.