Advertisement
Published: July 19th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Eve, Rusty and I planned a trip to Kamakura, about an hour outside of Tokyo to see the giant Buddha statue and visit the beach.
Kamakura was once the capital of Japan so it has many shrines and temples, but having seen one too many temples in recent months, we opted to make the trip for Daibutsu- the giant bronze Buddha statue. The Great Buddha Shrine was a 10 minute walk from the local train station, on top of a hill facing out towards the sea. The Buddha is over 10m high and was cast in the 13th century. The Buddha was once housed in a wooden building, but it was destroyed along with the town of Kamkura in 15th century by a massive tidal wave, leaving the Buddha standing alone.
The Buddha statue was impressive, but we thought it would be much larger. For about 10 cents you could climb into the Buddha and look out it's back, but we decided against it. After some pictures, we met a man who invited us to go watch him in a harness race at the horse festival in Soma City this weekend...we talked to him for awhile, but declined his
Buddha
Rusty, Eve, and I at the Giant Buddha invitiation. Sometimes, when people see that you speak English, you get asked all kinds of things, like the time when I was asked if I enjoyed making oranges...
Having had enough of the Buddha, we stopped for lunch at a local restaurant and headed out to the beach. the beach was beautiful, the water was warm, and it was packed with people. I have never been in water with such a strong undercurrent. Each wave would drag you back a few feet. We also managed to find a bar made of plywood on the beach that served drinks and snacks. It's rare to even find a patio here in Japan so this open-air beach bar looked like heaven. Sure enough, it was filled with other foreigners.
After our day at the beach, it was time to say goodbye to Rusty as he headed over to Narita for the night to catch his early flight back to Montreal the next morning. After being gone for 6 weeks and travelling through Japan and Thailand, Rusty, Eve and I checked out of our hotel, said our goodbyes, and Eve and I continued on to our hostel for the night...
July
17th is Marine Day in Japan- a nationla holiday. We found this out when we started looking for places to spend the night over a month ago. We were only left with one affordable option: the Khaosan Tokyo Hostel. The pictures looked nice and it was in a good location so we booked it. But pictures lie. I've stayed in hostels before, and this was by far the worst place I have ever been: the wooden floors were flimsy enough that when you stepped on them you sunk in a bit and the whole hallway moved with each step. We were shown our room by the desk clerk. Eve walked in, I walked in, and that was as far as we could go because with our backpacks on we couldn't move around our bunk bed room. I had to back out into the hallway to take off my bag before re-entering. After staring at eachother, the room, and laughing at "the best hostel in Tokyo", we breathed a sigh of relief that there was an air conditioner in the room. Then I turned it on: it gave off more heat than cool air, and since it was small room with
bunkbeds, Eve would have melted on the top bunk in all the heat. I managed to turn it off and throw open the window, but not before it burnt me as I reached for the switch. The whole hostel vibrated which resulted in my weighing the door knob down to keep the door from rattling all night. And we're not sure if there was an earthquake in the morning, or if it was just someone walking down the hallway.
The one good thing about the room was the great view of the Sumida River...and the cool breeze off the water. We tried to spend as little time as possible in the hostel, so we opted for a long italian dinner, followed by a walk over to Ueno to Ameyoko Market for some tea and dessert. We decided that it was best to just get dressed and get out of there as fast as we could in the morning and just do our makeup and brush our teeth at Starbucks.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.109s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 12; qc: 62; dbt: 0.0726s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb