Cherry blossoms and Japanese fashion

Last Sunday (April 22nd) Lora drove to our house, and then hopped into the car with Bert and I and Bert drove us all to the Japanese garden in Hasselt for a Jfashion meet. 
Bert doesn’t normally go to meets with us, and he rarely dresses up for them either (he hadn’t this time), but sometimes he tags along to take photos if it’s at a location he wants to see. Like a pretty Japanese garden. 

Click for cherry blossoms and Japanese fashion!

 

Getting there was a complete disaster. Whilst they know full well sat navs/gps systems have a hard time finding the location, the city still hasn’t bothered with proper signage. Nor with a proper description online. You can find it, you just need to really search for it in the vicinity the sat nav sends you to. So we lost about 15 minutes doing that. But we got there!

 

Sylvie, Maria and Maria’s friend who’s name I forgot (sorry!) were already there. So we got tickets (and NO, people at the ticket desk of ultimate slow, Japanese fashion styles are NOT cosplay, god fucking damn it!), free tickets thanks to our press passes (although the lady was convinced Lora and I were cosplaying so she would have let us in free anyway *sigh*). And then joined the others. Because there wasn’t a lot of space to wait for the people that weren't there yet, we decided to go a little further inside and wait on a bench in the shade. 

Maria and her friend went into the gardens, and we waited on the bench. 
It was so cool to see Sylvie, because we hadn’t seen her in years (literally!). And then Elsje arrived, and a little later Saltje, Tamara and their friend who’s name I also forgot (sorry!) and we found a spot to sit down and have our picnic lunches. There was food for sale, mostly BBQ type things, and some people did get food and drinks there because they were super cheap, which is great.



 

The gardens were still pretty full of pretty blossoms, but pretty crowded (to be expected). So it was really hard to get a photo without other people in the background. Personally I don’t mind, those people are there to enjoy the blossoms just like the rest of us :). 
I did mind the Russian family who had these super obnoxious kids that purposely kept running in front of cameras and grabbed branches to shake off all the blossoms. Especially because the idiot father kept on encouraging his spawn to do it because he was filming or taking her photo whilst committing the act of arboreal vandalism. Seriously. 
There were also tons of people climbing on over the ropes even though it clearly notes on the sign at the entrance that you are NOT allowed. The garden really needs to have staff patrolling the grounds to deal with all the nitwits.



 

I will say, I was pleasantly surprised we weren’t constantly harassed by douchebags who take photos without permission. There were a few, but not as many as usual, so that was great. I think the fact that there are now often cosplayers on the grounds to take photos, and them telling people off a lot too, has really helped. Yay for cosplayers! 



 

Anyway, Bert went wandering pretty quickly because the light was atrocious (he did take some photos of Lora and I).

 

Elsje shared our big bag of fish food (a huge bag for 50 cents is such a bargain!) with Lora and I and we fed the fish.



I took some more photos.

 

 

And also some more photos of the actual garden :).





Saltje took the group shots, the regular and the derpy one, of everyone that felt like being in them (group shot participation is always optional ^^).
She actually did an excellent job on framing and what not, but Elsje later decided she didn't want her photos online (which is fine, if she doesn't want to be online that's well within her right), so I cropped her out (and took down all photos off her from flickr). It was that or no group shot and that's too bad for the people in it :(
So yeah, cropped group shots. 

 

Lora and I wandered the grounds to find Bert and then we met up with the others to say bye as it’s still a bit of a drive to mine.



 

When we got to my place, the light was much better, so we went to play with the inflatable # in the field and Bert kindly took photos. 

And after that we watched Gravity Falls ‘till it was time for Lora to go home.

Good times! :) 

All the photos from the Japanese garden are here. 
If you see a photo of yourself you want, this is how you go about getting it :) 

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