Tulip Festival

A few weekends ago Ryan and I went to the Karumai tulip festival in Iwate Prefecture, not too far from where we live.  I missed this festival last year because I was getting ready to head out of town for my crazy European adventure.  So this year I was excited to be able to check it out.  

It's a little like Holland here.  Going along with the tulip theme there is a windmill right when you enter the park.  You can see the weather wasn't the best, but it wasn't raining so it was good.

It's a bush that looks like a turtle.  Cute!

They had a few of these.

Another picture of the windmill.

Lots of pictures with tulips.  They were primarily organized by color and type in little sections.

There was one area at the top of the hill with all different colored tulips.

I love this picture!  Ryan matches the flowers!

Lots and lots of beautiful flowers. 

I am not that familiar with tulips so I don't know about the names of all the varieties, but some of them were really cute or funny so I took pictures of some of the signs.

Here I am.  I don't match quite the same as Ryan but it's not too bad.

This is getting closer in color, but still not a perfect match.

More pretty flowers to surround myself with.

After we walked around the flowers we headed for the bridge and went for a walk over it.

Nice views down below.

It was a little scary to stop and stay still because the bridge swayed.

It was a decent sized bridge.

Coming back we could see the back of the windmill.

Before we left me made sure to give the local ice cream a try.  It was recommended to me and I like ice cream so I was excited to try it out.  We had no idea what the green flavor was, but the whitish color was vanilla.  We asked and tried to make sense of what she told us the green was, but we couldn't figure it out.  It was different and surprisingly good.  And the juice pictured just below gave us the answers we needed for the flavor.

In the store with the ice cream we also bought this.  I had no idea what sarunashi was so I Googled it.  I discovered this is known as monkey pear.  That explains the monkeys holding these little green berries pictured on many things in the store at the park.  The picture of the cut open fruit looked like a kiwi but it doesn't taste like one.  Interestingly, in the article I found online about this fruit here mentions that this  is called a "hardy kiwi" in English.  I am really glad we got to try this.

It was really a great day and I am very glad we checked this out.

QUESTIONS:  Have you ever been to a tulip or other flower festival?  Have you ever heard of monkey pear or hardy kiwi?