Halloween, the Ginrei festival and Kamikochi park!

Last weekend was very busy. There were three activities and they all took place in three days and one evening.

Halloween! Scary stuff.
Recently Halloween has become more popular in Japan. Until a couple of years ago you hardly saw any people wearing costumes or had any parties. Now there still aren't any children going door to door as they do in America, but the parties for grown ups have become more in numbers.
One of the students at our school also organised one of these parties and we went to the party. I tried to go as a Yakuza(Japanese Mafia) by wearing my suit, but that is apparently rather normal as I saw multiple people also wearing a suit. I also had a ice-hockey mask so that made it somewhat more creeper. All in all a nice party.

Ginrei festival.
The Ginrei festival was held at the Shinshu university campus. All the students that participated could have their own stand to sell whatever it was they were selling. Most of the stands sold food or drinks, but there were also exceptions like a haunted house.
Together the Dutch people also managed a stand where we sold a Dutch food! Oliebollen. Normally only eaten around new year. The first day we made two types, one with only raisins and one with raisins and apple. The latter was more popular so for the second day we decided to only sell those. In the end we had a grand total of 4500 yen profit, which is about 32 euro :P None the less a lot of fun!
There were some minor discrepancies in the beginning. For example you are suppose to bring your own stove and gas for said stove. Now if you are managing a booth with your club(sports club etc) you only buy those once and you have an investment. However, for us we had to either borrow these or buy them ourself. This wasn't fully clear to us at first because we though, surely the school would arrange these sort of things? After all it was only the 48th year of doing this festival. But alas no such fun, so we had to buy one real quick on the first day.

Kamikochi park.
This park is located in the mountains and is about 2 hours drive from Matsumoto. It isn't very far if you look on a map, however, to get there you need to take a lot of tunnels and (very small) twirly mountain roads. So in the end the time spend in the car/bus comes to about 2 hours.
At the park there are multiple things you can see or go to. Small signs give you directions to special area's. We followed a route to a small lake and took a lot of pictures on the way there. The journey was in this case more important than the end destination.
In the end we walked(hiked) for about 4 hours and returned to Matsumoto by bus once more.

So a very busy weekend! But again I got to see a bit more of Japan.