Saturday, March 21, 2009

St. Patrick's Day Parade?

The Nagoya St. Patrick's Day parade takes place on two roads in the covered shopping streets between Osu and Kamimaezu. The parade starts at Osu Cannon Temple and heads east, then makes a U-turn and heads back.
While walking east, I decided to skip to the parallel street and skirt the crowd to get to the front of the parade. Instead, I ran into the 'Free Tibet' march being held in the same shopping arcade at the same time as the parade. "What would be the chance of them bumping into each other?", I thought.
Sadly the Tibet group passed by the road that the St. Patrick's group were to exit from two minutes too fast for there to be a meeting. I think that the Tibet march leader started walking that bit faster when I asked him about the likelihood of an encounter. I must have sounded too much like a culture/political paparazzi.



And then the final mystery, the Indian film crew. One guy with a digital movie camera and an actor using the parade as a backdrop, walking around and looking bemused/aloof/mystical etc etc. What were they attempting to suggest with this location? Never got time to ask, but one of the assistants told me that the Japanese girl who was sometimes in shot was the (ex?) miss Japan. More mystery.

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