Chichibu Day Trip

A little day trip to Chichibu today! Woke up at 9:00am today, had a bit of rice for breakfast before being picked up by another ALT. We drove to another ALT’s house to pick up 2 more friends, and then set off for Chichibu which is in Saitama prefecture! Our first stop was the café I went to last time with my school librarian, Jurin’s Geo. I really wanted to go back to try their other menu items, since the day we went before they had run out of a lot of things. We each got the ice cream sandwich and the skillet pancakes. The ice cream sandwich was SUPER good – the bread was probably homemade, and I think it was brioche dough since it was just super yummy. The skillet pancakes looked very pretty, but they were kinda average for its price. After that we drove to Mitsumine Shrine, but the とんかつ place that I went to last time was closed by the time we got there, so we didn’t get to eat the delicious katsu. We still went to the shrine to take some photos, since the other ALTs hadn’t been there before. We then drove to downtown Chichibu, where the festival was being held. Chichibu’s Yomatsuri (秩父夜祭) is one of Japan’s top three festivals to feature floats (alongside Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, which I’ve attended before, and Takayama Matsuri).

We circled around a lot trying to find parking before just parking on some random grounds which looked park-able. Walked to the festival and bought a lot of festival food (yakisoba, fried chicken, chocolate banana, crepe, etc.) and enjoyed seeing the different floats being pulled. It got really cold really fast though, so we decided to leave a little early and left at 20:00. On the drive out we stopped a little bit away to watch the fireworks, and it was really nice to be able to watch the fireworks from far away in the nice warm car. Drove back and got back home around 21:30. I was really tired and cold so I decided to go onsen instead of showering at home, and I was super glad I ended up making that decision – it felt super good and I slept very soundly. The onsen is also a little cheaper after 22:00 so that was good too!