London Okinawa Day 2010
June 26th, 2010
Today some friends and I went to Spitalfields Market for the London Okinawa day. I attended the same event last year, where there were plenty of stalls selling Japanese food and merchandise. You could try on a kimono or samurai helmet, and there was a large stage with traditional music and dancers. It was a very enjoyable day that I had stumbled upon by accident, and so I was really looking forward to it today.
Unfortunately, the event this year was a disappointment. Everything seemed to have been scaled down; maybe it was due to the recession or maybe the world cup, as there were very few stalls of merchandise and food, and no big stage. There was a small square that was used for some classical court music and traditional folk music, plus a karate demonstration which wasn’t that impressive.
But the best thing about today was that we had dinner at a nearby Ping Pong restaurant. Although it was a Chinese restaurant, and did not fit in to our Japanese themed day, we had some really superb Dim Sum. It reminded me of the Dim SUM my wife and I had in China at the Dim Sum banquet in Xi’an
The tea was also really good too; I had the Flowering Dragon Eye tea, which is “Hand tied green tea wrapped around a golden calendula flower, with an arch of jasmine fowlers topped with a globe red amaranth ‘dragon eye’ flower” check out the images below for the tea
