Sightseeing in Takamori and The Taste of Fall Festival

On Saturday I spent the day with two of my lovely friends, and they get credit for all the pictures taken because my camera batteries died!
We started out at my favorite German bakery and had coffee, tea and lunch. Then we went to Shirakawa Suigen, which is a fountainhead. You pay 100 yen to go in and you can drink/take as much of the water as you like.

See how clear the water is? It's beautiful.

Next we made paper at a little shop there. I had trouble getting mine to be smooth so I needed extra help.
Then we decorated the paper with dye, dried flowers, and bits of gold and silver.

This is what it looked like in the end:

There was also a Shinto shrine and lots of beautiful flowers:

Our next stop was Takamori Tunnel. I had already been there twice, but I love it. It was meant to be a tunnel for a train, but after it was built, it turned out that there was too much water underground. Now you can pay 300 yen to go inside and see works of art made by local people. Oh, and there's a river running through the middle of the tunnel, so you have to be careful not to fall in!

In the evening we went to the "Taste of Fall" festival in Takamori. I'm pretty sure the town has a lot of money because they were giving away free alcohol and there was a raffle to win 600 kilograms of rice. I didn't win the big prize, but I got a cabbage and some peppers.There were lots of good foods there, including grilled tofu with miso and whole fish covered with salt and grilled on a stick:

The entertainment included dancing lions who went through the crowd biting people on the head. I didn't get bitten, though I hoped I would be! (It makes you smarter, they say.)

The festival ended with a long fireworks display. In Japanese it's called a "Hanabi Taikai", which means fireworks competition. I don't know why they call it that!