Sanjo Matsuri, Boat Trip and Fish Market Deception

Hi guys

I'm afraid this will be a rather short post, as I don't have much time on hands.

On Friday we went back to Asakusa with Alessio's parents.
There the Sanjo Matsuri was being held, which is one of the three great Shinto Festivals in Tokyo (one other being the Meiji Spring Grand Festival, on which we have a post aswell).
The Sanjo Matsuri, which can be translated into "The Three Shrine Festival", is held in honor of Hinokuma Hamanari, Hinokuma Takenari and Hajino Nakatomo, the three men who established and founded the Sensō-ji (the large Buddhist Temple adjacent to the Asakusa Shrine).
At the festival, men and women carried portable shrines (Mikoshi) to the Asakusa Shrine, chanting and jolting the shrines as they went. This jolting supposedly intensifies the power of the deities mounted on the top of the shrines.

It looked horribly strenuous however, and one really could see how the porters were struggling just to support the sheer weight of the shrines.
Other than that one was able to see floats with musicians playing the flute and beating the drum, and artisans dressed in traditional Japanese robes.

After leaving the festival (which seemed to go on forever) we took a boat trip down the Sumida River and then split up for supper, so that Alessio  could spend some time with his parents alone while I had a night out with Seng, a Malasian whom we had become acquainted with thanks to my army friends.

At the time of my writing this post it is 3:00 a.m and we are waiting in a Manga-Café for the Tsukiji tuna fish auction to open.

UPDATE: After struggling to find the entrance to the tuna fish auction we finally arrived at around 4:30, only to be told that the maximum capacity of visitors had already been reached and that we should come back the next day at 3:00 a.m :-(.
Instead we had to make do with ambling through the market place and watching the shop owners open up their stores.