A Perfect Day for Sakura

This weekend was the last weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco's Japantown, and what a beautiful spring day it was for the occasion. It's been a couple of years since I've gone to this festival, which is primarily a street fair, so I checked it out on Saturday. (If you read this on Sunday, you can still get out there for the last day.)

A lot of the food booths were community groups using the event as a fundraiser. They were selling a lot of sushi and Spam musubi (I saw at least three booths selling this), and there were some Japanese treats, like this red bean pancake called imagawa yaki.

The booth with the longest line was this one selling teriburgers (hamburgers with teriyaki sauce).

Here are the guys manning the grill for the teriyaki burgers. So local, yeah?

Another booth with a long line, but not as bad as the teriburgers was this booth selling teriyaki fish balls.

And of course you can't have a street fair without deep-fried foods. Here a guy is manning the hot oil to deep fry mochi, the Japanese sticky rice cakes.

Woah, who's making all that smoke? Oh, it's the Asian American Firefighters Association grilling up some teriyaki ribs. I guess they know how to control fire.

There were tons of taiko drum performances and martial arts. It was just like Japan (or what I imagined it to be like in the spring) standing under the mini grove of cherry trees to watch the entertainment, getting some shade from the sun. When there was a breeze, it blew some of the blossoms off the trees and they fell slowly all around me like pink snow. If I could write poetry, I would at that moment. But I don't, so all I did was go get a sukiyaki bowl and continued to enjoy my day.