JAPANESE FOOD!!! Toka Ebisu shrine festival Osaka. #marketfriday

Hey fellow Steemians I should first start by saying sorry I haven't been very active over the last few days, I have been out exploring Hong Kong to the point of exhaustion and getting some great footage to share with you all. The last couple of days have ended with a good Chillum smoke and passing out for some much-needed sleep but now I'm feeling refreshed, reset and ready to start writing again so let's get started with my Blog about the Toka Ebisu festival in Osaka for the #marketfriday contest hosted by @dswigle.

This festival was a nice surprise over the last few days of our travels in Osaka and we got a real good look into traditional and contemporary Japan and the country's food all in one place. We were first told about the festival from our friend Kimi and it sounded like it was some kind of street party so of course, we went to check it out. To our surprise, it was a traditional festival that has been going on since the 17th century, people come from all over to pray to Edisu the patron deity of commerce for success in business. We didn't know this at the time as we arrived at the beginning of a huge food market showcasing the best foods from all over Japan so we just thought cool, food market let's eat!. It wasn't long before we saw lots of people carrying decorated bamboo branches towards the big shrine in the area but I will get to that later, for now, let's check out all this amazing food.

The Japanese love their crepes, you don't have to walk far in any Japanese city to find big icecream, cheesecake, and chocolate stuffed crepes.

For those of you with a sweet tooth, they had all kinds of candy fruit and decorated Cowboy Bananas..........standard for any well balanced diet, I think.

Still not sure what this was all about but It is a white snake of some sort in a cabinet, maybe you pay for a real snake bite experience? Test your venom tolerance game I don't know but I was willing to find out.

I would love to list everything that we saw but there was just too much food, most of which I had not seen or tried before. Everything from Takoyaki, seafood, fish-shaped cakes and chocolate bananas with faces, the list goes on so I will try not to ramble too much but it was amazing and there was something for everyone no matter your taste.

This sweet potato stand was awesome, they had all kinds of different flavors and it was great as sweet potato is one of my favorite foods.

We came across this happy chap rocking out in his little mini bar to some party tunes.

There were lots of little game stalls throughout the market for the kids and you could try your luck at winning some gold fish or stuffed toys etc.

This was some sort of bacon, egg and pancake tower, it looked delicious.

Some traditional rice cakes stuffed with red bean and other fillings.

They love their Squid and Octopus in Japan and the cook it in lots of different ways.

These were kind of vegetable hashbrowns fried with bacon, eggs and there were lots of different varieties of this kind of food.

There were a few places like this around the market were people could take a seat, grab a beer and enjoy some great shellfish.

This is something we call fish bacon, it's thin pieces of fish grilled to a nice crispy bacon texture and if you llike fish and bacon this is the food for you.

Throughout the food market, there were lots of side street with huge stalls selling good luck Bamboo branches decorated with lots of lucky items such as gold coins, sea bream, rice bails, and all kinds of colorful things. You might be thinking "did he just say sea bream?" yes I did because apparently, Edisu is also the patron deity of fisheries too, as you can imagine it was strange seeing this stuff not knowing what it all meant at the time.

The festival itself was a mystery at the time, we googled it when we got home but it was a lot of fun and the atmosphere was very great. After following the people carrying bamboo branches we walked into the shrine area where there was a huge mass of people buying branches from different groups of people dressed in different clothing. I'm not sure how to describe it other than each group were wearing different traditional clothing and seemed to be offering different kinds of written prayers and bamboo branches, I'm assuming for different kinds of business or something like that.

Sorry for the lack of knowledge on this one, I couldn't find details on the different groups within the shrine but it was all very colorful and spirits were high, a very cool place to be this time of the year. If you know more on this subject please let me know in the comments.

I will finish this one with a few more pictures of some food and the guy who gave me the biggest portion of noodles I had ever eaten. I think @capone145 has a Vlog on the guy dishing it up.

Thank you for checking out my post if you enjoyed it please give me a follow for more travel blogs. STEEM ON!!!I hope you enjoyed this Blog and I hope it's worthy of the #marketfriday contest by @dswigle.