Kamakura

I neglected to add this photo to yesterday’s blog - the 4 of us at the VERY long section of airport.

We were heading to Kamakura today, which is on the coast just southwest of Tokyo.  It’s about an hour and a half drive, partially on highway, and partially through cities.  Fortunately, we took our lucky bus, and not our unlucky one.

   

Tokyo has a sort of Eiffel Tower of their own.  I guess it was built in  the 1950s for television and radio reception.  A little outdated now, but a landmark they use to light up  in different colours.

Since it was a fair distance, we had some time to kill on the bus.  So our local guide taught us some origami.  We can do anything!

We first arrived at the Hokokuji Temple and Kamakura Bamboo Garden.  It’s a Zen temple established in 1334 to commemorate one of the first shoguns.  This is a little Buddha seen everywhere in Japan.  

   
 A quiet, serene area that the Japanese find sacred.

 The bamboo forest was incredible.  I guess some of the leaning, etc., is due to the high winds of the recent typhoon.  This gives you some idea of the size — as Gerard said, a little bigger than his old bamboo fishing pole.

We went off to another temple in Kamakura called Tsuragaoka Hachiman-gu (easy for anyone else to say).  

This one is used a lot for weddings and other ceremonies...like this little girl’s ceremony, the first time a little girl wears an obi with her kimono.

And there was a photographer there taking pictures of this newlywed couple.

We liked this shrine because of all the sake stored in these barrels here!

At this point, it was lunchtime, so they directed us to this street around the corner filled with shops and restaurants.  We picked one, and had some beer.

And Gerard had this omelette.  OK.

Our last stop was the great Buddha called Daibutsu.

When we were done here, we headed back to Tokyo and the Ginza district, which is high end shopping and dining.  All your Gucci and other top-notch well-known stores are here.  We had about an hour to kill shopping (not), so we just went off to find a beer somewhere.  We had to talk the restaurant into letting us have one and then we’d leave.  That was OK if we left in an hour and a half. No problem.  (It was hard to find just a little bar in this area.)

We then met up with our guide again, who took us to a restaurant nearby.  This was quite the spread at each table when we arrived. 

 

I’m definitely going to lose weight here.  

Anyway, we took the subway back to our hotel for the night.  It was a long day.  In the subway stations, they have barriers up in front of all the tracks.  I guess with the volume of people, it is possible for people to be accidentally pushed onto the tracks.  Not somewhere I’d like to be in rush hour!