At the end of rice harvesting season, the folks of the Kagawa and Niigata Prefectures in Japan hold a straw festival to celebrate the abundance of the harvest. Dried straws cover wooden frames to form larger-than-life sculptures from animals like sharks and gorillas to vessels such as ships and tanks. The family-friendly event invites visitors of all ages to engage, interact, and play on the enormous structures.

Nobby the polar bear cools down as he plays in a lake at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Doncaster, England, Friday June 17, 2022. A blanket of hot air stretching from the Mediterranean to the North Sea is giving much of western Europe its first heat wave of the summer, with temperatures forecast to top 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) from Malaga to London on Friday. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Wire via AP Photo)

A man dressed in the likeness of the Hindu deity Agni Kandakarnan performs during the Theyyam ritualistic dance festival on March 14, 2023 in Somwarpet, India. Theyyam is a colourful socioreligious dance form that is the amalgamation of ritual, vocal and instrumental music, dance, painting, and literature and its genesis can be traced to the coastal regions of the southern Indian states of Kerala and Karnataka. (Photo by Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images)

Members of carnival marching bands in costumes parade through the streets during the so-called “Morgestraich” carnival parade in Basel, Switzerland, on Monday, early 07 March 2022. The traditional “Morgenstraich” parade with colorful lanterns and revelers in traditional costumes is starting early morning at 4 a.m. and marks the kick-off for the Basel carnival. It was not held in its usual form in the past two years because of the measures against the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo by Georgios Kefalas/EPA/EFE)

This November 8, 2019, photo provided by John Guillote shows a view from the main lab of the Sikuliaq in the Chukchi Sea. University of Washington scientists onboard the research vessel are studying the changes and how less sea ice will affect coastlines, which already are vulnerable to erosion because increased waves delivered by storms. More erosion would increase the chance of winter flooding in villages and danger to hunters in small boats. (Photo by John Guillote via AP Photo)

A tourist lies down on the tomato and water soup that has formed on August 30, 2023 in Bunol, Spain. Spain's tomato throwing party in the streets of Bunol, Valencia brings together almost 20,000 people, with some 150,000 kilos of tomatoes thrown each year, this year with a backdrop of high food prices affected by Spain's historic drought. (Photo by Zowy Voeten/Getty Images)

Asbjørg Nesje from Norway is a participant and trains in front of the Opera House in Oslo, Norway, on August 25, 2023, one day before the 2023 World Championship in Døds Diving (Death Diving). According to the organisers, Døds is “a form of extreme freestyle diving from heights jumping with stretched arms and belly first, landing in a cannonball or a shrimp position”. (Photo by Javad Parsa/NTB via AFP Photo)

An infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope which shows generations of stars is seen in this undated NASA handout image released February 14, 2013. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region). Red shows heated dust that pervades the region's cavities, while green highlights dense clouds. (Photo by NASA/Reuters/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian/Handout)