Well, here is the day I’ve been waiting for. The group met at 1200 noon so until that time I killed the morning at a small museum.

The bag and luggage museum is way more interesting than it sounds lol. It’s free so that helped a lot too. A suitcase manufacturer has the museum upstairs from its customer service area; I guess they had the space?

Anyhoo it was full of beautifully made leather suitcases and stuff like that. Also bags and trunks from all over the world. My favorites were the crocodile handbags. I know its not PC right now, but damn some of them were nice.

After that, upstairs from the bags was a kind of memorial to the manufacturers founder. Someone had a serious crush on the guy. According to the memorial, he didn’t deliver world peace but damn close.

After a giant piece of fried chicken, it was sumo time.

We all trooped over to the stadium together on the metro. Right off the bat I almost ran into a fighter bc I wasn’t looking where I was going

Oops

After passing through bag check and getting our nosebleed seats, we had an hour to get food and look around. The sumo museum was PACKED. I wish I could have taken pictures. The wrestlers wear these apron things before the fights, and the museum had a bunch. Very colorful and wonderfully embroidered.

One of the traditional foods that wrestlers eat is chanko, a soup. Its really nice and quite nutritious. We got to try it. Luckily for me, today was a curry flavored one. Its slightly different every day.

Now for the arena. It’s a sports arena, and the seats are better than I expected for the cheap seats.

You can watch sumo stuff on YouTube and it’s pretty accurate. What it misses is the yelling. Fans constantly yell out loudly the names of their favorites. It’s also very tense for just the few seconds that the match lasts. If you can keep a match for 3 minutes that’s a loooong one.

It was super fun. We only sat and watched for 2 hours, but it could take all day. Get there early, eat, watch the wrestlers arrive, museum, watch all the practice and beginner’s matches, etc.

It was fun and I’m glad I finally saw a tournament in person.

Would I watch all day, every day for 15 days? No.

Tomorrow a couple of museums. There’s a good art museum of only woodblock prints nearby.

Good night

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