Sakura Festival

Saturday was Sakura Festival at IPC (international pacific college). It was a huge event for a small town like palmerston, so I just had to check it out.

Please note, since the only camera I have in palmy is my er...fone... so all the nice pictures here were obtained from Hui using her super pro-looking camera.

IPC is really a pretty campus, it had a whole row of sakura just to accomadate the Japanese students. IPC is basically an institute that target largely Japanese oversea students. A lot of 'rich' Japanese students like to get some overseas exposure, so their parents send their kids to IPC.

I heard rumours that IPC is like party town everynight, which seems almost weird given how peaceful and 'country' like it looks.

There were displays of Japanese doll collection. I remember studyign about them in form 4 but never had the opportunity to see a real life one. Though I must say, the ones in the textbooks looks nicer.

Among the activities, there were the Japanese drum performance. It was awesome!!! really really awesome!!!! You wouldn't expect an institute team like this to be so professional. Every bean, every movement was so uniform! and the way they danced around the drum while keeping to the beat is nothing short of spectacular. I heard from someone that this drum team performed all over New Zealand professionally.

And what would be a festivale like this without the food stalls!! Although, the food isn't particularly special in any way, and I had.. the worse rice burger ever!! Though I did try this Indonesian thing called masabak or something. It was basically egg with peas and onions etc wrapped in some sort of pastry and fried. Not too bad, but definately greasy.

For the frequent goers, the novelty of drums and the displays have faded. To them it was just a brillliant day to enjoy the picnic under sakura trees... like how it should be celebrated.


As for us.. what's a better excuse to take the day off and just relax...