penises, farms, sakuras

What a week! Haru yasumi is over and I am sad. Its cold back home! The shink back to Nagai was ridiculously packed. Even the aisles of the unreserved cars were filled. Anyways, vacation. Its difficult to retell everything that happened because there was so much.
I'll start with the penis festival. There was a 2 meter, 620 pound phallus and a group of men paraded it through the town to the shrine with the waiting female counterpart, i.e. vagina. The festival was orginally celebrated to herald new growth and fertility. Regeneration, new growth, substenence for survival, all encompassed in penis and vagina. The paradigm of reproduction.
I will put some pics up of the festival. When I arrived in town, it was very early because I had taken the night bus to Nagoya. It was almost like a ghost town, but by 1pm, the town was full of gaijin and Japanese people waiting to catch a glimpse of the phallus, chow down on choco penis banana, penis sautee, yakisoba, penis pops, and food on a stick. When the crowds were starting to grow, a man wanted me to pose with him in a picture with the penis and all of these huge nikon lenses and expensive looking cameras popped out of nowhere. I have no idea why, but he wanted me to put his yellow cloak over my large pack too. I had to stand there for almost 5 mintues while numerous pictures were taken. Other Japanese people who were waiting to have there photo taken with the phallus were visibily annoyed. I still don't know why there were so many pictures of me with this man and the penis.
Nagano ken rocks! Other stuff happened like a party at Logan's with a very interesting keg. It was good to see where Logan lived. He has some nice inaka life going on there.
Then it was on to the farm in Yamanashi ken. I thought I would be staying with the Farmer's mother who only spoke Japanese. But apparantely there had been problems with that in the past so all current Woofers stay at his house. So, it ended up just being me and the farmer hangning out one on one all day for 4 days straight. I was dissapointed because he spoke mostly in English and I didn't get to practice nearly as much Japanese as I would have liked. Also it was a bit strange hanging with this old dude who kept calling me cute because of my blonde hair. All in all, it was good though, planted some grapes, learned a few things, went to a winery, strawberry farm, etc. He also had a really cute hyper black retreiver. Not golden, black. So I got to walk/run the dog every morning.
The night hike for wednesday night was canceled because of rain. I was really dissapointed. Then the alternate hike for thursday fell through too because of weather. Bummer again. But I met a random Yamanashi JET and we went to a nice Italian place, then to Tokyo.
Later, in Tokyo, I met up with Erin and Gengo. Went to the museums, Ueno, tokyo tower, harajuku, etc. The usual Tokyo fanfair. This is ending now because I'm going to bed.