Japanese Market in Leiden

Today, a very special event has took part in Leiden. Regarding the great influence from Japan, a Japanese Market has been setted up by Japanmuseum Sieboldhuis. The event has been inaugurated by the Mayor of Leiden as well as the Ambassador of Japan. As you can see in the picture below. Interestingly, because of the Ambassador holds his position only from two months ago, he still doesn't speak Dutch, so his speech has been given in English. For me it has been great, because I have only understood him, the other speeches were in Dutch and I applauded when I saw the rest of the public doing it. I didn't understood the jokes neither.

The market took the whole rapenburg street. It started at breestraat and finished in kaiserstraat. There were a lot of street shops and hundreds of people (basically, it was completely crowded). The shops were selling not only traditional Japaness items but also products that can only be found in Japan, such as pumpkin or mint kit kat, Japanese drinks and sweets.

There were really impressive kimonos in all textures. Some of them were more rough and other were soft, with a silk-like texture. The inside of most of them represented vegetal items in golden and other brightful colours.

Also, food was really easy to find, specially sushi. Just at the beginning of the street there was a shop selling yakishoba, rice, sushi, etc (it doesn't matter which one of both sides of the street you consider the beginning). I've tried a sort of small pasty filled with prawns and vegetables, i don't know the name of the thing itself, but it was absolutely delicious. (Ik vind dat lekker). Because after eat them I was still hungry I bought yakishoba. It was nice, the only problem was that they give me sticks, there was no fork. I had never eaten using sticks, but after some trials I finally achieve eat the yakishoba with the sticks, what, regarding that they are noodles is quite hard.

Another interesting shop was about bonsais. Actually there were two. One selling bonsais, from 15 euro to over 100 euro. They were all kind of trees and sizes. They were really beautiful. 

The other shop wasn't selling bonsais but the tools for taking care of them. They were also showing three terrific trees. They were bigger than the previous ones. One of them had the leafs red and it was absolutely awesome. I would take it with me to my home for sure. Besides, part of the roots were visible and a light layer of moss covered the soil.

However, it wasn't everything about buying. Inside the Rijksmuseum van oudheden some martial arts performances were carried out. The place was incredible because it has been just in front of an ancient Egyptian temple. There, two different styles has shown their movements, including defence agains stick pretending swords and knives.

Finally (but not less important), I would also mention about other shops. It's fairy common in these kind of events to find people doing cosplay and shops focus on manga and anime issues. This market count also with the presence of cosplayers and a lot of anime/manga/videogame items being sold. The only issue was that almos all of them was in Japanese, what is nice if you're so into the culture that you can read it, but for the rest of the mortal isn't that good. Some of the shops were really specialized, for exaple one of them only sold figures of the characters who appears in the series. So for those who are into the kawai/otaku culture, this will be felt as home.