Festival family.

Yosakoi Soran Festival is a HUGE deal in the city we live.
A big 5-day dance event, over 1 million visitors and thousands of amateur dancers in crazy costumes perform through the streets behind trucks with massive sound systems, waving flags and shouting/singing.
It's here and there and everywhere. You can't escape it. The subways are full of dance teams hurrying to another performance place and streets are closed for the event.
I love it. Japanese people going just a bit crazy, in the best possible way ;-)
Saturday evening Okaasan came home.
She'd been to Odori, the center of town.
Did you see the Yosakoi Festival?
The festival? No, where is it? Is it near the university? I didn't see anything....
God knows WHERE she'd been - maybe walking round the underground shopping area with her eyes fixed on shops....
Hard to miss Yosakoi really. People try. But they fail. Saturday afternoon in Sapporo you'd think it would be impossible NOT to see it.


So, Sunday we took her.
Down to our local shopping area, where teams dance up and down the street, for the locals.
One of my old students and her husband run the drugstore, so we got given chairs and could sit on the pavement and let all the dance happen before us.
I think Okaasan enjoyed it. Maybe. It IS very noisy, and many of the teams we saw were scary looking youths wearing black and doing dramatic gestures....not quite Okaasan's kind of dance really. 
NO flowers and plastic beads :-)


By 11.30 she was looking hungrily at the food stalls, as she hadn't had breakfast. So we left and had family lunch in a local "family restaurant", which was ok.


And then supermarket shopping.
We usually avoid this at all cost. Shopping with Okaasan: very stressful, because she shops at a different pace to us and examines everything carefully...and buys all sorts of random stuff we don't know how to cook!!
Between the carpark and the store doors she told us twice that THIS was the shop where she buys her magazines (we know)...and then once in the store she grabbed a shopping cart and went on ...and on...and on about "I need my magazine".
Yujiro craftily disappeared upstairs to get printer ink - leaving Okaasan and Me to shop together.
I managed to get her to stand 1 minute in front of cat food while I hurled cans in he trolley, but she was impatiently whining "my magazine, my magazine" JUST like a small child : "MUmmmmmmeeeee, sweeties, pleeeese!!!!"
When she needs something, she needs it RIGHT NOW. Of course she doesn't know that she expressed that need 20 seconds ago, 40 seconds ago...so she goes on...and on.
Finally I let her trolley away to the magazine corner, while I went back to the main entrance to get another basket - and do the food shopping in peace.
10 minutes later we all met up - by the Taiwan bananas :-) Which she bought, carefully. I'll be interested to see if she likes the fruit she has selected herself.


And so, on and on.
Sorry, this blog is pretty mundane. Life with dementia, lots of "same".
No great earthshattering stuff to report.


But my cats are cute. :-)