Narumi

Our festival was lovely and…

 

Hello guys! I’m Narumi. I’m a student of Te-Kuiti High School with my mate, Monami. I’m spending lovely days here in NZ and enjoy knitting and chatting with my kiwi friends for my free time. Actually, I started knitting in NZ. My host mother is my teacher for knitting and now I have been trying to knit socks! Like this, I have had nice experiences these three months since I came to this town. 

 

My town, Te-Kuiti, is a small and farmy town. This town has just three times as many people as Jin-ai High. Today, I will write about a unique event of Te-Kuiti I experienced during the break. That event was really funny, awesome, and crazy!

The name of that festival is called, “The Great New Zealand Muster Te-Kuiti.” It was held on April 2nd. On that day, the main street of Te-Kuiti was really busy. There were hundreds of people, lots of food shops, Maori works shops…. Yes, a lot of kinds of shops. By the way, my host mother Sue runs her own shop on the main street of Te-Kuiti. So, she opened her handcraft shop for the hundreds of people that day, too. 

 

That day, I went out with my friends to enjoy the festival. That cool experience was really fresh to me, and became one of my lovely memories. Through reading, I’m sure many of you guys must be feeling, “It’s the same as Japanese festival.” Well, please read below before you decide!

 

New Zealand is consisted of two sheepy islands, North and South Island. “Sheepy” means the place that you can see sheep everywhere. Te-Kuiti and “The Great New Zealand Muster Te-Kuiti” are sheepy, too.  For example, do you know sheep shearing?  To get wool from sheep, we should shear it. In the sheepy country like NZ, shearing is a really important work and sometimes a kind of sport! So, we saw that big shearing competitions during the day. As I wrote, it’s the normal thing in New Zealand. But, this festival has another crazy event on end of the day. Can you guess what? 

 

The answer is “The Running of the Sheep!!” 1103 sheep and two goats ran down the main street of Te-Kuiti!  Sheep dogs made the sheep run, and people who were looking at that event on the pavement made “a wall” to keep the sheep on the road (without this people’s fence, the sheep would run away). Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that job. However, I saw and took photos of the road full of sheep. There were sheep, sheep, and sheep! It was a really great and funny view. Actually, I had heard of this sheepy road from Sue the day before this festival, but I was truly surprised to see this strange and unique view with my own eyes. Unfortunately, it was raining at the moment. But, it didn’t matter because it was just a small thing! This festival became a precious experience for me. Because… we can’t hold this types of events in Japan!!