Turning Japanese (for 1 night)

I lied when I said I wouldn't have another post until after our beach trip. We had too much fun tonight to not put it on here. When we came back from the grocery store tonight we couldn't find a parking spot outside our apartment, which we quickly realized was due to the throngs of people going to the Auckland Lantern Festival.  The festival was in Albert Park, where I went on one of those first days and it had the pretty fountain and it's only about 2 blocks from our apartment. It was barely even recognizable tonight. There were lanterns in the trees, lit up figures, and stands selling Asian food up and down the street. I headed up there with Mary, Cindy, Kayla, and Erin and got some good pics. So without further ado, the pictures (sorry if they are fuzzy)...

 This has nothing to do with lanterns or festivals but the sky looked pretty cool.

 

One of the entrances

 And now here are some lanterns. These were in hanging from the trees in the front of the park. It's kind of hard to tell what the shapes are from this picture.

 And these are some butterfly-looking critters on the base of a tree.

 And then they had all of these lit up blow-up looking figures. I call this one Lion Posing on Big Ball.

And then we got our own lanterns. I know they aren't as impressive as the ones in the trees but I liked them.

 Mary liked her lantern.

 And this is the token giant dragon

 And me posing with the token giant dragon.

 This was actually cooler than it looks in the picture. These dragons were in the big fountain in the middle of the park and moved around.

 I know it's hard to see my face in this one but that's me posing with penguins.

 A bunch of lit up sheep and one lonely cow

 This is what we found on the other side of the park. They closed down the street and had tents lined up down both sides of the street for a few city blocks and they served different kinds of foods from each one. The atmosphere was a lot like the Plaza Art Fair.

 This building is on the street with all the tents. They lit it up and looked pretty amazing in person.

 The sign basically describes Mary.

 And this is the ice cream on top of half of a watermelon. Delicious.

 I couldn't believe that they lose enough kids to actually make a tent for it. It's also where we found Mary.

 These moons and stars were one of my favorite things there.

And this is when everything was shutting down so there weren't many people to block my view of how the lanterns were hanging from all the trees.

That was fun... Cindy got some better pictures than I did so I'll have to steal them from her and put them on another post. We're getting up in 6 hours to go to the beach! Gotta go to bed but one last thing before bed. In honor of this post's title, I give you a classic 80's tune--