Summer Festival @ The Japanese School

Dearest Princesses,

We brought you both for the Summer Festival @ The Japanese School this evening. This is something that we watched on Japanese TV programmes before where school students will attend a fair / carnival of some sort to celebrate the coming of summer in Japan. The female students would dress up in yukatas (Japanese ethnic attire) too.

When we got there, we were told that we could not park within the school compound. We were directed to the industrial estate nearby to park. We went one big round to get to it and then had to walk back to the school. Thankfully, it wasn't too far away to walk. We decided to leave the stroller in the car as we felt that it would be too crowded to push a stroller in the school and we were right. However, this meant that we had to carry you again, Ashley, which of course left us tired once again.

There was a long queue for tickets to get into the fair but the queue was quite smooth flowing so it wasn't too bad. After getting the tickets, we went in and looked around.

To our disappointment, there didn't seem to be many things going on. There were only a small number of games stalls and food stalls. The queues were super long though as the crowd was huge but the stalls were few. However, there were a few girls dressed in 'yukatas' though many of them looked Singaporean.

While we were walking, Papa was carrying you, Ashley. At one point, we had to stop for a short while for Che-che to do something and Papa overheard a group of Singaporean girls behind us talking about how cute you are! One of them even took a photo of you! Her companions then chided her for not asking permission from us before doing so but she never did so. :p Anyway, Papa didn't bother to turn around as this has happened quite a number of times.

However, after we got to where we wanted to go, we stopped and Papa let you stand on the floor! Imagine our surprise when we saw you holding onto a yo-yo balloon (something one of the stalls had - a water-filled balloon tied to a rubber band so that one could play with it like a yo-yo). Where on earth did you get that! You must have held on to it for quite some time! Did the big che-ches give it to you?

Anyway, we decided to queue to fish a yo-yo balloon for you too, Skyler, so that both of you could have one. You managed to get one that had stripes on it. It was so nicely designed that mei-mei wanted it too! :D

We then walked around a bit more to see what else they had - not very much as it turned out. However, there was a stage that they had set up on the school field where several groups of students took turns to perform on. Skyler, you wanted to go onto the field to have a picnic and while we wanted to let you do that, it was getting too late and it was still very crowded so we decided to give up on that. Also, we couldn't get any food for you to picnic with as the queues to the food stalls were simply way too long!

We ended up at a stall where they encouraged people to play a few games to get a souvenir. Mama ended up playing all the games - five stones, chatek, memory-matching, and Skyler, you played 'kuti-kuti' with erasers with a lady in charge there. We got a 'ketupat' as the souvenir.

We were exhausted by the time we left. It had been so crowded and it'd been one long day. We also had to walk the whole distance back to the car!

We hope you girls enjoyed yourselves.

Papa and Mama love you both lots!