Our first festival

On Sunday, the kids had their first official day of school. But rather than a normal school day, it was the annual Tondo festival, where you welcome in the New Year (a bit late, admittedly) by building a massive bonfire and burning all your ancient traditional cultural New Year bamboo sticks and fronds and bits of paper with New Year’s resolutions written on them.

After the bonfire, the kids had lunch in the tents.

Because Sunami doesn’t have a large public space, the Tondo festival for the local area is held at Sunami Primary School, in combination with the school’s own version. This provides a wonderful opportunity for all the old folk of the district to get together with the kids and teach them stuff that nobody knows how to do any more these days, like pounding and moulding the mochi rice cakes, weaving straw snow shoes and playing with spinning tops. Naturally the new parents in town were only too keen to get amongst the Culture, as you can see here:

The grade sixes were responsible for pounding the mochi too, so Ruby got to have a go:

Once the bonfires died down, we all toasted our rice cakes over the embers on super-long bamboo stakes and shared them with the kids. It was great fun and an excellent way for the kids to get to know their new classmates.

Click here for more photos.