May Day (May 1) this year was a very exciting day! We had never celebrated it before, but there Germans celebrate it and have a really cool tradition that each town puts up a May Pole, or Maibaum in German about every five years so we decided to go watch one being put up. This one was put up manually, as opposed to some who use cranes to put them up. So the tradition is, the men and boys in your town go and cut down a tree and carve it and paint it and between then, which is normally sometime in April, and May Day, someone in the town has to constantly be touching the May Pole. It can even just be a small child as long as they are awake. If your May Pole is not "guarded" it can be stolen. That doesn't seem very possible, but apparently a popular radio station here stole four May Poles this year!
So it was very rainy, but this is what it looked like about half an hour in. the whole thing took about an hour and a half.
It was a small town and everyone came in their Trachten with Beer. We felt kind of out of place.
Slowly going up...
This was the church right behind us that had a bell that kept ringing.
At one point someone came out with the big mugs of beer and all the men passed them around and started smoking while they worked.
Finally it was up and a band began to play and there was a speech and they put up a flag.
The final thing.
Later that day we got to go to the airport and pick up the fifth member of our family!!! It was so weird, but amazing to see Tosha again and I couldn't believe how much she had taken on the Japanese culture, but was also so much the same.
Teary-eyed, but happy to be together again.
The family reunited!
The three amigos!!! Tosha said she kept looking down to see if we had weird stilts or shoes on because we both grew so much while she was gone.
We are SOOO happy to have her home!!!
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