Kamakura

My second Monday in Japan, I went to Kamakura, a (supposedly) beach town outside of Tokyo (I never saw the water).

Before leaving, though, I had to drop some packages off at the post office. Even with the suitcase I bought, there's just no way that I'm going to be able carry all my souvenirs home, so I'm packing up the bulkier ones as I go and mailing them home. Thankfully, it wasn't too difficult. I walked in, said "EMS kudasai!" (their express international package shipping), and they handed me a form. I filled it out, showed that I wasn't mailing anything explosive or taxable, weighed it, and paid.

I caught a train directly from Shibuya station this time, which was nice, as I got to cut out a half-hour of metro travel to Tokyo Station. Once there, I tried to get oriented to which way the tourist map was facing (again, maps here aren't necessarily oriented with north at the top), then went off to find lunch. Ended up getting a chirashi bowl (a bowl of rice topped with stuff, seared tuna in this case) at a place called the @round cafe. The place was kinda strange; it was australian themed!

Made a friend outside of the Shinto shrine.

After lunch, I wandered back to the main station plaza and started walking up the obligatory souvenir/shopping street that connects the train station to the town's main tourist attraction (they exist in any tourist town on earth, be it in Europe, Japan, or elsewhere). In this case, it was the Shinto shrine Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu, which was built by the first shogun of the Kamakura era*. It was a gorgeous day out, so I took my time getting there. On the way I bought a few sweets, then got one of the city's specialties: purple sweet potato soft-serve ice cream. It was good! It tasted kinda...potato-y. Didn't get any souvenirs, though.

Once at the shrine, I mostly just wandered about outside. I was heading to Kyoto the next day, the land of temples and shrines, and didn't want to get burned out too quickly. I grabbed some candied grapes on a stick (which were exceedingly crunchy and absurdly purple) and tried to avoid the swarms of school children gawking at me. Seriously! There were So. Many. Children. And the little ones were just shamelessly staring at me. While wandering, I almost stumbled through some sort of religious ceremony going on. I was walking through some trees when I came across a pavilion in a clearing with a few priests in the cream-colored robes and black bouncy hats from Nikko. They were praying, with some police blocking the other path into the clearing. I'm not sure why mine wasn't blocked, but I just turned around. Later I saw the priests walking back to another shrine, with the police clearing a path through the schoolkids.

750 year old juniper trees. The had crutches and stands
propping up a bunch of the branches.

I walked past the main shrine building to get onto the rode headed to Kenchoji, the first Zen Buddhist monastery founded in Japan. It was yet another of those experiences where "Americans think 100 years is a long time; no one else does." There was a grove of juniper trees that was something like 750 years old, right next to a brass bell cast in 1255. They also had a nice garden out back that I sat and watched for a bit (seemed the Zen thing to do).

I started back down the hill to the main drag and intended to walk down to the beach, but then quickly realized that it was close to 5, when a lot of temples and shrines close for the day, so I instead hopped on a bus for the Kamakura Daibutsu, the great Buddha statue. It's around 40 feet tall, made of bronze. There's not a whole lot else to see up there, but it was worth the 130 yen or whatever it was to get up there. Also had a conversation with a friendly Japanese guy while sitting on the wall there. We didn't talk about anything in particular, it was just nice to chat ^__^

The Daibutsu!

The bus ride home was a little more complicated. The first stop I went to was headed the wrong way, so I grabbed a fried sweet potato to much while I looked. The one I actually needed was outside a cheap souvenir shop across from the entrance. I hopped on, rode back to the station, and headed home. Since that was my last night in Tokyo, I decided to end my stay in the city with a sushi dinner. My concierge recommended Midori Sushi, the place with the line out the door and around the corner, which I just wasn't feeling up to. He then said they had a branch that was a conveyor belt sushi place on the top floor of a department store next door to Shibuya Crossing. I went, made small talk with a couple visiting from LA, and proceeded to spend the meal making sure they didn't overcharge me. The place was PACKED and our waiter was waaaaay overworked, so I don't think it was anything shady, just a bunch of mixups.

*'Eras' and 'Periods' in feudal Japan are pretty easy: they're just named after where the shogun was based at the time. For example, the 'Edo' period was when Edo (Tokyo's former name) was the shogun's capital.