Wednesday, September 19, 2007

2007 Tofu Festival: Other Perspectives


The Non-Food Booths:
A very informative experience

As there were alot of people at the Tofu Festival enjoying good fun, lively entertainment, and friendly people, I, Tofujii, tried to venture off to check out some of the other booths, besides the Tofu ones. It was not long before I ran in to some booths that caught my eye. After all, the Tofu Festival is not only about "Tofu," but actually about other informative things such as community service, cultural information, public and health service, and don't forget fashion and Asian arts and crafts!

The Tofu Festival booths I visited include the Beer Garden, where booth #95 was located, called Singha Beer. Here, people came to escape from the Tofu Festival heat to escape from the blazing hot sun and sat down with friends and family to enjoy themselves with some ice cold beer.Everyone at the Beer Garden seemed to enjoy themselves, which costed 5 script tickets. I noticed many people wearing a colorful, festival wristband, which indicated that they were 21 years or older.
I then headed over to a Japanese cultural booth called the "Aomori Tourism and Convention Association." They were located in the Health & Fitness area, booth number #34. This booth had alot of valuable information about Japan such as prefecture (state) information as well as city information that tourists can learn about. I loved that my friend and I were able to take a free "goodie bag" of free stuff that I could fill up with free maps, pamplets, bookmarks, and tourist brochures. The "goodie bag" was so cute, because it had a really cool picture of the red-faced, scary-looking Aomori (Japanese god or deity) from Tohoku, which is a prefecture located in the north of Japan. I also enjoyed that people at the booth were very friendly, and were willingly to answer many of my questions about Tohoku, where the Aomori orginated from, and about the much anticipated Aomori float itself, a replica brought all the way from Japan!!! People in the Little Tokyo community were actually building the Aomori by hand!!! This was one of my favorite booths to visit in the entire Tofu Festival!!!
As I made my way down to further booths, I stopped by booth #69, which was the Chinatown Service Center. I, Tofujii, work for a non-profit company, the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), so I was interested in other social service and community agencies. I had volunteered at CSC before, but I wanted to get a better knowledge of what CSC was all about. As I checked out their booth, I got to pick up brochures that talks about CSC's involvement within the Chinese and Chinese American community, in Chinatown! CSC is involved with the immigrant and elderly community, helping people and improving people's lives everyday. I really learned a lot about CSC and their purpose as a social service agency.
Finally, the Rafu Shimpo was a really nice and interesting booth for me to visit. I enjoyed visiting their booth the most because I know, being a member of the community, that the Rafu Shimpo, is one of the most active, involved, and influential newspapers in the Little Tokyo community. I talked to the Rafu Shimpo representative and he was quick to hand me brochures of the latest news, really chic and new graphic looking bookmarks, and informed me about the upcoming new sections in their newspaper such as their new sports edition and youth page, including a section dedicated to martial arts! I can't wait, since I do a little martial arts myself! Rafu Shimpo, overall, is a great newspaper, that continues to do such good for the Japanese and Japanese American community, as well as helping to contribute overall to entire Los Angeles and Southern California communities.
That's all for now! See u soon with my last blog about one more ecxiting and memorable experience of the Tofu Festival!
Mata ne! (See u later)......Coming back soon! =p
Tofujii Tofu






No comments: