Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival 2012

There was the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco, which was held on April 14th, 15th, 21th, and 22th. My friends and I went there at the last day of the event on Sunday because there was the grand parade in Japan Town.

We left our campus right 9:00am then drove to the Bart station in Pleasant, and then we use the Bart, which took about 40 minutes, headed to San Francisco downtown. We arrived at San Francisco downtown around 11.

The first thing we did was to find a good Japanese restaurant. I actually searched some restaurants on the web a day before. I stopped by a Japanese style restaurant named Nojo. It had teriyaki foods and was a kind of Japanese cuisine, not a sushi restaurant. The restaurant we went was Sushi Hana. Because I saw a menu in advance and found "Cherry Blossom" sushi, I had wanted to try it. It tasted good and was visually cool!

After lunch, we move to near Japan town where the grand parade showed up. The parade was awesome!! In my opinion, it was better than the Chinese festival, which I saw last February in San Francisco as well.

Actually, I had not even imagined that there are such a lot of Japanese people and organizations in San Francisco. The number of Japanese who showed up was totally more than expected.

I felt kinda being proud of Japanese culture. 

When the parade was about to finish, we move to the center of Japan town and looked around Japanese shops and restaurants. I found more shops than I had imagined. Also, I saw a lot of signs written in Japanese.

 Again, there were so many people in Japan town. It was chilly but people heated up the event area.

We took a instant photo machine (photo booth) to make tiny stickers called "Pikapika" -we call it Pri-cla in Japan though- in the Japan center. It was first time for me to try it in the U.S. Everyone was so excited and I was happy but only thing Americans were disappointed was the size of the sticker picture because it was too small to share with everyone.

At evening, I chose another Japanese restaurant for dinner. Maybe some of my friends looked boring though...(^^;) I ate Sukiyaki. It was pretty nice :P

We left there at night. A friend bought me a biggest size of Redbull for my driving.

It was really nice event in San Francisco ever!