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"More than 150,000 people will attend the 35th anniversary of the San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival on the weekends of April 12-13 and April 19-20". Well, dunno how true was that but we had a good crowd today. "The Cherry Blossom Festival showcased traditional Japanese arts with continuous demonstrations of, among others, tea ceremonies, martial arts, taiko drumming, and traditional dancing on an outdoor stage in the Japan Center". We missed the outdoor stage though.

There were also parades, Asian food kiosks, and live music. The grand parade began at 1pm, starting at the Civic Center, and proceeded down Post Street in Japantown. The parade featured the Mikoshi, or portable shrine, dancers in kimonos and traditional musicians. This year’s grand marshals were Osaka Mayor Takafumi Isomura and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

The irony was that there were no beautiful cherry blossom trees for us to see! Perhaps we did not go to the tea garden where there were a couple of cherry blossom trees. But the festival and parade were enough. Enjoy the pictures!

Japan Airlines float	Drummers preparing
Safeway float	Asahi Beer float
We saw a line of people at the space in front of the City Hall	The facade of SF City Hall
Nichi Bei Times float	Another drum group
Wow, what a lot of people (mostly kids) in costumes	Halloween?? No, there's a costume contest going on where contestants dress themselves up usually as anime characters or video game characters
Rahul's friend, Rahul and Edric	Me and Edric
A Gundam suit carrying a school bag...	Put down the bag and raises the light saber
The full view of City Hall	Rows of botak trees
Me in front of City Hall	Sitting on the grass patch and taking pictures
Nice costume, her family helping her do up her costume before the photo shoot	A pair of cute bunnies
Sagara Sanosuke from the Rurouni Kenshin anime series	Super Mario!
Female version of C3PO from Star Wars?	A break from the photo shoot, what's going on in the meantime? A group of people have gathered at the main entrance of City Hall
Some female ninja	Another unidentified character
Kid with a sword taller than her...	Here comes the blue-haired one...
Gundam Robot	The costume even has retractable wings, real cool!
Himura Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin anime series	An anniversary banner of a certain Japanese elementary school
The Mayor (the black gentleman with a yellow suit and grey hat) with past and present beauty queens.	Various queens posing for a shot
Mayor with the queens	The drummers start
Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr.	The Mayor of San Francisco
Boy Scouts leading the parade and we followed the parade from City Hall to Japantown...	What's that thing?
That's a biggie	Dancers consisting of senior women
Waving to the people on the sidewalks	Tram
Consul General of Japan and his wife	Carp
Scout Band	Girl Scouts
Yamano International Beauty Association	It also says Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Northern California
Mini Scouts	Cherry Blossom Festival banner and here we are at Japantown finally after walking from City Hall
A sort of pagoda	The Kendo group
Denny's Japantown San Francisco	Crowded on both sides of the street
Singing band...	This is quite funny, the 2 men in sumo wear were bouncing up and down as the float moved and there were a bunch of men holding them and the float. Other people around the float were splashing water at them...
Ok, float parade is over and let's head for lunch... hungry and it was about 3pm... Some sparse cherry blossom trees outside a Japanese mall	Here we are at Japan Center... had lunch at a Japanese restaurant
And explored the Japan Center after lunch	Some tents and booths outside the mall... and pretty soon, they were packing up to close and we headed home. =)
From left: Edric, John and Jessie who were Olivia's and Eugenia's colleagues, myself and Eugenia. Olivia left early to go church after lunch. Also at Japantown were Rahul, Yusuf, Prem and Akshay, but we split up cos' they already had lunch and they went somewhere else...

Some more pictures from Eugenia's camera:

Eugenia, Olivia, me and Edric

Edric, John, Jesse, me and Eugenia