Japan: Day Seven
A few things to add to my last entry:
In the Studio Ghibli Museum section, I forgot to mention the Catbus room! How ridiculous of me... So yeah, in "My Neighboor Totoro" there's this, um... cat... bus. Catbus. Here, do a Google Image search. Catbus is awesome. One of the rooms in the museum has a gigantic Catbus for kids to crawl around on and in. It's all soft and plush, and the play area even has "dust bunnies" / "soot balls" (also plush) for kids to toss around. One of the images that comes up in the Google search is of the museum's Catbus, actually, so there you go. It was great fun to just watch the kids. Kris and I both wished we could ride the Catbus too, but it's only for kids.
Also, very shortly after I saved my Day Six, Part One entry -- on Wednesday morning, Japan time -- we had an earthquake! It was very small, but it was my first one ever, so I was really excited! At first it just felt like maybe somebody in the house had slammed a door or something, but it got a little stronger, and went on for like 30 seconds. It just felt like everything was swaying back and forth a tiny bit, less than a centimeter. There was no sound or anything. I'm pretty sure this article is a report of the event, as it's got the time almost exactly right. I can't believe I forgot to mention that in Part Two.
So, moving on, here's today's photos and entry, depicting Thursday, September 2. Today was Seth's birthday! Pictures:
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~sstoneb/japan/sep-02/
We got to sleep in a little today, which was a nice change, although not by all that much since we wanted to get moving out toward Kamakura, outside of Tokyo, at midmorning. Despite having gone to bed at around 2 AM last night, I woke up at around 8 or 8:30, and proceeded to do stuff online for a little while and get showered and such for the day out. Kamakura is a less bustling area with tons of old shrines and temples. It seems to be a big tourist spot, as well; during conversation at one point, Kris and Seth sort of agreed that Kamakura is to Tokyo sort of what Providence is to Boston.
It took over an hour of train rides to get out there, via Yokohama, during which I had another coffee milk for breakfast -- a new brand this time, stronger than the Kirin brand I had twice before -- and Kris and I took ibuprofen to try to dull our muscle pain. We got off at Kita-Kamakura (Kita=North) and started walking, once we applied some sunblock. The first shrine we stopped at (pictures 02-07) was a lot like the others we've seen so far, although there was a larger property with a few smaller shrines, a garden, a couple caves (no entry, boo), a graveyard, and a gigantic bell (the second largest in Japan). Okay, so I guess it wasn't all that much like the other shrines after all. But I don't have pictures of a lot of that stuff because it was really hot and I didn't feel like standing around taking photos, and the few I did take had bad brightness-range problems and were basically crap, so I dumped them.
We left that property and walked aways down the road towards Kamakura proper, stopping briefly at another small shrine where a set of statues referred to as the 12 judges of hell live. This shrine didn't allow photos, so I don't have any of that either... But they were pretty angry-looking statues, for the most part.
Continuing on, we passed a store that had a big plastic ice cream cone in front of it, like so many stores have, but on this one the soft serve ice cream was purple instead of white. We pondered the meaning of this for several hours, wondering if it might be grape (has anyone ever had grape ice cream? I know popsicles come in that flavor, but it's really uncommon for ice cream). Many stores all through the day had these purple ice cream cones out front. Eventually we realized that they are some sort of sweet potato flavor; that area is known for its sweet potatoes, apparently, and Japanese sweet potatoes are purple on the outside. By the time we figured this out, we were low on time, and I didn't want to spend any more money, so I didn't try the sweet potato ice cream out, which I now sort of regret.
As we moved into Kamakura we were starting to get hungry for lunch, but saw a shrine entrance across the street and decided to check it out. This led us to a very large area full of stuff that we spent quite some time in (pictures 08-16). One of the coolest things here was a pond full of very tall leafy plants that had ducks, a crane, turtles, and fish all in it. There were also doves/pigeons milling about, and people tossing food around. What variety! The pigeons were pretty unafraid of people, and could easily be tempted to land directly on people who had food for them.
It's common for people visiting shrines in Japan for prayer to leave some sort of offering to the gods/spirits, usually in the form of something consumable. Often, this is sake. Twice today though, at different shrines, we saw that people had left a juice box on the shrine as their offering. Times change, I guess.
After meandering out of that large shrine area, we emerged into downtown Kamakura where there were lots of gift shops. I picked up a present for Jenni and Graham (probably Jenni more than Graham, but, I'm still looking for the right thing for him), and we started looking for food, as we were now all really hungry. This took a painfully long time, but eventually we went into a place which was mostly italian, mainly because it was right there and we were starving. This restaurat had a very unusual feature: all the (nonalcoholic) beverages were completely free. Not just the refills, but getting a drink in the first place. They had a great selection too with various kinds of juice, tea, pop, and -- something I've never seen before, but should have known existed -- real strawberry milk made by blending strawberries into milk instead of using Strawberry Quik. It was so delicious. That, and the smoothies Seth has been making, are almost enough to prompt me to buy a blender for my apartment and occasionally pick up some fruit from the grocery store. For my actual meal I figured I'd get something at least mildly Japanese, and went with a seafood dish: pasta with crab and some creamy sauce. Turned out the sauce was oily, not creamy, and there were hot red pepper flakes all in it, and the crab wasn't just crab meat -- it was legs, some of them already half-shelled, some of them merely cracked -- sitting on the pasta that I had to dig the meat out of. This took forever, and I wasn't very good at it. Since I was so hungry (despite all the milk I was downing) it was even more frustrating. But, it was all tasty (aside from the unexpected peppers), at least. The decor there was a little weird, too. It was one of those italian restaurants where the inside has, like, stucco walls and dividers and stuff. On the walls they had wooden cases for curios, and about half of the curios were toys. Mostly dinosaurs and Godzilla stuff. In the bathroom, they had both Dragonball and Dragonball Z versions of Goku riding a dragon. Also, not too surprising for a foreign-food restaurant in a big tourism town, it was English-friendly to an extreme, with completely-English versions of the menu, and a waitress who spoke English pretty well.
Anyway, after the food we got on a bus to the other end of town for our last stop: The Great Buddha, or Daibatsu. It is a really, really big Buddha. It used to have a house around it, but the house got destroyed in a tidal wave decades ago. The gigantic bronze statue, though, stuck around, and he's still sitting outdoors to this day. Like the bell we saw earlier, Seth says this is the second-largest in Japan. One amusing thing is that under one of the cloisters next to Buddha, there is an enormous pair of straw sandals, I guess in case he ever feels like going for a walk. Also, for 20 yen you can go inside Buddha, as he's hollow. Kris quoted some kung fu movie he's seen by saying, "I know this Buddha -- you can enter it from the rear." Until Seth's birthday party later that night, the Buddha was the largest concentration of non-Japanese people I'd seen since I got here. Nearly 20% or so were clearly of foreign heritage.
We walked from the daibatsu down to the shore. There's a nice bay in Kamakura, although the beach (and presumably the water) was incredibly garbage-rich. I'd even say it was shockingly garbage-rich. Regardless, this was my first visit to the Pacific Ocean, so I took off my sandals and waded in for a minute. I also spent a minute or two scanning the sand, and eventually found a largely-unbroken shell to take home.
From the beach we took a little trolley/train (very much like Boston's green line, which made me happy) back to Kamakura Station, and then spent a mildly outrageous 890 yen on the return ticket to Shinjuku. (And it's another 250 from there to Seth's house in Komaba.) For the trip out we'd been a little more clever, and covered part of the distance on a cheaper train line. We then hastily de-stinkified ourselves and got back on the train to Ebisu, where we were meeting three of Seth's friends for an Okinawan dinner before going to the mass-attendance party at the bar run by another of his friends. We ate with three lovely ladies, the spelling of whose names I have to guess at for now: Australians Cynthia and Skye, and Japanese Kazuyo. The food was pretty good. It was mostly traditional Okinawan stuff, and consisted of noodles, incredibly soft pork, and inoffensive vegetables. Kazuyo, who had picked the restaurant and was doing the ordering, threw in a couple of surprises/jokes, like ordering a taco salad (not to be confused with a tako (octopus) salad) and a plate of Spam (which was actually sort of tasty, kind of sausage-like). I can't imagine the restaurant normally serves those things.
Finally, at least half an hour after the party at the bar had officially started, we left the restaurant and went one train stop back to Shibuya to go to the bar. At Seth's request, I had brought a bunch of packs of Jell-o with me so his bartender friend could make Jell-o shots, which are a rare commodity here as flavored gelatin isn't sold anywhere. I gave the bar party a halfhearted effort, but I just couldn't take it, and left after, at most, 90 minutes. It was smokey, and crowded, and the music was so loud that even shouting to the person right next to you didn't guarantee being understood. The people there seemed nice, but, it's just not an environment that I can have a conversation in. As I write these words it's been three hours since I left, and my throat is still raw and itchy from the smoke and what little yelling I did.
Our plans for tomorrow encompass the Edo Museum -- for real this time -- and Akihabara. If any of my friends reading this want some electronics goodies, email me before you go to bed, and if I check it in the morning I'll keep an eye out for what you want. Cynthia gave me the tip that if I take and show my passport there I can get a small discount for some reason, some sort of duty-free thing or something. With that, I'm going to go to bed. Seth and Kris will probably come stumbling home in a couple more hours.
In the Studio Ghibli Museum section, I forgot to mention the Catbus room! How ridiculous of me... So yeah, in "My Neighboor Totoro" there's this, um... cat... bus. Catbus. Here, do a Google Image search. Catbus is awesome. One of the rooms in the museum has a gigantic Catbus for kids to crawl around on and in. It's all soft and plush, and the play area even has "dust bunnies" / "soot balls" (also plush) for kids to toss around. One of the images that comes up in the Google search is of the museum's Catbus, actually, so there you go. It was great fun to just watch the kids. Kris and I both wished we could ride the Catbus too, but it's only for kids.
Also, very shortly after I saved my Day Six, Part One entry -- on Wednesday morning, Japan time -- we had an earthquake! It was very small, but it was my first one ever, so I was really excited! At first it just felt like maybe somebody in the house had slammed a door or something, but it got a little stronger, and went on for like 30 seconds. It just felt like everything was swaying back and forth a tiny bit, less than a centimeter. There was no sound or anything. I'm pretty sure this article is a report of the event, as it's got the time almost exactly right. I can't believe I forgot to mention that in Part Two.
So, moving on, here's today's photos and entry, depicting Thursday, September 2. Today was Seth's birthday! Pictures:
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~sstoneb/japan/sep-02/
We got to sleep in a little today, which was a nice change, although not by all that much since we wanted to get moving out toward Kamakura, outside of Tokyo, at midmorning. Despite having gone to bed at around 2 AM last night, I woke up at around 8 or 8:30, and proceeded to do stuff online for a little while and get showered and such for the day out. Kamakura is a less bustling area with tons of old shrines and temples. It seems to be a big tourist spot, as well; during conversation at one point, Kris and Seth sort of agreed that Kamakura is to Tokyo sort of what Providence is to Boston.
It took over an hour of train rides to get out there, via Yokohama, during which I had another coffee milk for breakfast -- a new brand this time, stronger than the Kirin brand I had twice before -- and Kris and I took ibuprofen to try to dull our muscle pain. We got off at Kita-Kamakura (Kita=North) and started walking, once we applied some sunblock. The first shrine we stopped at (pictures 02-07) was a lot like the others we've seen so far, although there was a larger property with a few smaller shrines, a garden, a couple caves (no entry, boo), a graveyard, and a gigantic bell (the second largest in Japan). Okay, so I guess it wasn't all that much like the other shrines after all. But I don't have pictures of a lot of that stuff because it was really hot and I didn't feel like standing around taking photos, and the few I did take had bad brightness-range problems and were basically crap, so I dumped them.
We left that property and walked aways down the road towards Kamakura proper, stopping briefly at another small shrine where a set of statues referred to as the 12 judges of hell live. This shrine didn't allow photos, so I don't have any of that either... But they were pretty angry-looking statues, for the most part.
Continuing on, we passed a store that had a big plastic ice cream cone in front of it, like so many stores have, but on this one the soft serve ice cream was purple instead of white. We pondered the meaning of this for several hours, wondering if it might be grape (has anyone ever had grape ice cream? I know popsicles come in that flavor, but it's really uncommon for ice cream). Many stores all through the day had these purple ice cream cones out front. Eventually we realized that they are some sort of sweet potato flavor; that area is known for its sweet potatoes, apparently, and Japanese sweet potatoes are purple on the outside. By the time we figured this out, we were low on time, and I didn't want to spend any more money, so I didn't try the sweet potato ice cream out, which I now sort of regret.
As we moved into Kamakura we were starting to get hungry for lunch, but saw a shrine entrance across the street and decided to check it out. This led us to a very large area full of stuff that we spent quite some time in (pictures 08-16). One of the coolest things here was a pond full of very tall leafy plants that had ducks, a crane, turtles, and fish all in it. There were also doves/pigeons milling about, and people tossing food around. What variety! The pigeons were pretty unafraid of people, and could easily be tempted to land directly on people who had food for them.
It's common for people visiting shrines in Japan for prayer to leave some sort of offering to the gods/spirits, usually in the form of something consumable. Often, this is sake. Twice today though, at different shrines, we saw that people had left a juice box on the shrine as their offering. Times change, I guess.
After meandering out of that large shrine area, we emerged into downtown Kamakura where there were lots of gift shops. I picked up a present for Jenni and Graham (probably Jenni more than Graham, but, I'm still looking for the right thing for him), and we started looking for food, as we were now all really hungry. This took a painfully long time, but eventually we went into a place which was mostly italian, mainly because it was right there and we were starving. This restaurat had a very unusual feature: all the (nonalcoholic) beverages were completely free. Not just the refills, but getting a drink in the first place. They had a great selection too with various kinds of juice, tea, pop, and -- something I've never seen before, but should have known existed -- real strawberry milk made by blending strawberries into milk instead of using Strawberry Quik. It was so delicious. That, and the smoothies Seth has been making, are almost enough to prompt me to buy a blender for my apartment and occasionally pick up some fruit from the grocery store. For my actual meal I figured I'd get something at least mildly Japanese, and went with a seafood dish: pasta with crab and some creamy sauce. Turned out the sauce was oily, not creamy, and there were hot red pepper flakes all in it, and the crab wasn't just crab meat -- it was legs, some of them already half-shelled, some of them merely cracked -- sitting on the pasta that I had to dig the meat out of. This took forever, and I wasn't very good at it. Since I was so hungry (despite all the milk I was downing) it was even more frustrating. But, it was all tasty (aside from the unexpected peppers), at least. The decor there was a little weird, too. It was one of those italian restaurants where the inside has, like, stucco walls and dividers and stuff. On the walls they had wooden cases for curios, and about half of the curios were toys. Mostly dinosaurs and Godzilla stuff. In the bathroom, they had both Dragonball and Dragonball Z versions of Goku riding a dragon. Also, not too surprising for a foreign-food restaurant in a big tourism town, it was English-friendly to an extreme, with completely-English versions of the menu, and a waitress who spoke English pretty well.
Anyway, after the food we got on a bus to the other end of town for our last stop: The Great Buddha, or Daibatsu. It is a really, really big Buddha. It used to have a house around it, but the house got destroyed in a tidal wave decades ago. The gigantic bronze statue, though, stuck around, and he's still sitting outdoors to this day. Like the bell we saw earlier, Seth says this is the second-largest in Japan. One amusing thing is that under one of the cloisters next to Buddha, there is an enormous pair of straw sandals, I guess in case he ever feels like going for a walk. Also, for 20 yen you can go inside Buddha, as he's hollow. Kris quoted some kung fu movie he's seen by saying, "I know this Buddha -- you can enter it from the rear." Until Seth's birthday party later that night, the Buddha was the largest concentration of non-Japanese people I'd seen since I got here. Nearly 20% or so were clearly of foreign heritage.
We walked from the daibatsu down to the shore. There's a nice bay in Kamakura, although the beach (and presumably the water) was incredibly garbage-rich. I'd even say it was shockingly garbage-rich. Regardless, this was my first visit to the Pacific Ocean, so I took off my sandals and waded in for a minute. I also spent a minute or two scanning the sand, and eventually found a largely-unbroken shell to take home.
From the beach we took a little trolley/train (very much like Boston's green line, which made me happy) back to Kamakura Station, and then spent a mildly outrageous 890 yen on the return ticket to Shinjuku. (And it's another 250 from there to Seth's house in Komaba.) For the trip out we'd been a little more clever, and covered part of the distance on a cheaper train line. We then hastily de-stinkified ourselves and got back on the train to Ebisu, where we were meeting three of Seth's friends for an Okinawan dinner before going to the mass-attendance party at the bar run by another of his friends. We ate with three lovely ladies, the spelling of whose names I have to guess at for now: Australians Cynthia and Skye, and Japanese Kazuyo. The food was pretty good. It was mostly traditional Okinawan stuff, and consisted of noodles, incredibly soft pork, and inoffensive vegetables. Kazuyo, who had picked the restaurant and was doing the ordering, threw in a couple of surprises/jokes, like ordering a taco salad (not to be confused with a tako (octopus) salad) and a plate of Spam (which was actually sort of tasty, kind of sausage-like). I can't imagine the restaurant normally serves those things.
Finally, at least half an hour after the party at the bar had officially started, we left the restaurant and went one train stop back to Shibuya to go to the bar. At Seth's request, I had brought a bunch of packs of Jell-o with me so his bartender friend could make Jell-o shots, which are a rare commodity here as flavored gelatin isn't sold anywhere. I gave the bar party a halfhearted effort, but I just couldn't take it, and left after, at most, 90 minutes. It was smokey, and crowded, and the music was so loud that even shouting to the person right next to you didn't guarantee being understood. The people there seemed nice, but, it's just not an environment that I can have a conversation in. As I write these words it's been three hours since I left, and my throat is still raw and itchy from the smoke and what little yelling I did.
Our plans for tomorrow encompass the Edo Museum -- for real this time -- and Akihabara. If any of my friends reading this want some electronics goodies, email me before you go to bed, and if I check it in the morning I'll keep an eye out for what you want. Cynthia gave me the tip that if I take and show my passport there I can get a small discount for some reason, some sort of duty-free thing or something. With that, I'm going to go to bed. Seth and Kris will probably come stumbling home in a couple more hours.