Nara Sister City Festival: Canberra, AUSTRALIA

Each year in Canberra, there seems to be a celebration of the sister city relationship with Nara, Japan. A little festival on the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin at the Japanese Gardens that is nominally a showcase of Japanese arts and culture, as well as a chance for the local officials and politicians to trot out some speeches.

I had seen the advertisements about it, but I had never really thought about going... but my kids are obsessed about Japanese stuff, food and films mostly... and it was a good chance get them out of the house while my wife was stressing out about learning repertoire on the piano!

There were quite a lot more people than I had expected... and we had to end up eating our dinner of Chinese dumplings and Italian pizza on the ground. It was a bit funny that there seemed to be a dearth of Japanese food... but it was also in part due to the huge queues for food that we just stopped at the places that were the nearest and easiest to get to.

However, the thing that my kids wanted desperately to try out was the rolled and folded ice cream... I've never heard of it, but they had. So, we had to stand in line to order and then wait in line for the order to be ready. And let me tell you, despite the cold weather, this was a huge hit... and the wait time was on the order of an hour or longer!

So, we mostly experienced the festival from the holding area for waiting for the ice cream! But it was near enough to the stage that we did manage to see all the acts there... including this Japanese/Australian musician playing a traditional plucked string instrument...

So, this was the moment that we were all waiting for... rolled ice cream. You can see them pouring the cream on the freezing metal plate, and the scooping, folding, then rolling the sheets of frozen cream into the rolls that you can see... and then the rest is loaded up with all manner of sugar and flavourings!

Actually, I have to say that it was pretty damn good!

Oddly enough, the festival was done by about 2100... which was time enough for the kids anyway, they were pretty tired... and they were also freezing to death after pigging down the ice cream in the cold night weather!

Next time, we will come earlier... and see more of the actual festival events... not just the rolled ice cream... which later, I found out that it is more of Thai thing!