25th Nov 2006

Argh! Seemed to have ignored my alarm and woken up at 7am! So I’m late! Rush out of my room to meet Marc and Mike at Shinjuku. Ends up not being soo bad as they are a bit late too… We have breakfast at the station noodle bar which is almost as cheap as the university canteen…330 yen for a bowl of udon…
Then get on a train to Kamakura. The train is packed so we have to stand most of the way…however, when we do manage to get some seats Marc falls asleep within about 2mins of sitting down…poor guy hasn’t had much sleep…Mike and Marc have been staying up all hours catching up on the past 6years in which they have not seen each other…

When we get off the train we then go find the large buddha (see http://waywayinjapan.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html) Go walk around some temples. We even get to walk into the Buddha…for a sum of 10yen..which was fun…it was and empty Buddha…with people standing inside it obviously thinking ‘I’m inside a hollow Buddha…isn’t that nice…now how do I get out?’ anyway there was one tiny staircase to get both in and out of the Buddha…and that was just wide enough for one person to happily do that and there were people trying to get in and out at the same time through this space…so that was fun.

Mike buys some incense sticks to pray to the Buddha with, and I manage to offend…well…Buddha I guess by blowing on the incense to get it burning…although in true wayway style I was rather overly efficient at this and instead of burning like incense should it caught fire properly…ooops! Yeah, anyway apparently you shouldn’t blow on the incense to make it light…bad luck or something. We wonder around the grounds for a bit…very peaceful…

On the way to the next temple we stop off to buy some yam crisps (sweet and very nice) and some yam jelly (meant to be eaten with green tea) and look into a crazy souvenir/heavy weaponry shop…although I think most of it is for ‘displaying-on-your-wall-at-home’ purposes…which includes lots of knives swords and ninja stars…nice. There’s also a special ‘plum’ shop, which sells a range of things made from plums…kind of condiment for savoury foods…

We then walked to another temple, although I think this one was actually a Shinto temple rather than Buddhist…on the account that I didn’t see a giant Buddha. It had an amazing view of the town as it was high up on the hill.

We then get on a tram to Kanagawa and have lunch at a nice little restaurant. We had Japanese omelette which is veg and some meat (if you like) or seafood fried with egg on the hot plate in front of us. We also tried the non-eggy version which was just fried veg. I kept doing every thing wrong but is was fun to play with the spatulas any how…and it was sooo tasty. Will have to do it again.

After lunch we walk around to the island, this involved lots of stairs…and a nice temple at the top…we happened to see lots of eagles flying about overhead. Eventually we reach to beach and rest for a bit before taking the boat back towards the station to save us the walk.

We get to the station and buy tickets back to Tokyo but as we have to wait an hour for a train we go sit in a bar and have root beer. The train we got wasn’t any train…it was called the ‘romance car’!!! I have no idea why. Anyway we ate the yam jelly and yam crisps.

Back at Shinjuku we decide to go to dinner in Koenji to a flamenco bar that a guy that Mike knows owns. It’s tiny and packed (there are 3 birthdays going on there)The great thing is that we can see the owner (john) cooking! It’s great. We drink sangria and eat tapas…everyone is tired (particularly marc) but the food is amazing. Parma ham, chorizo, olives, burdock root, cockles, mushrooms stewed, hand baked bread sticks, duck and chicken terrine, chicken liver pate (soo smooth). Had some deep fried meat balls with aubergines, peppers, fresh tomatoes and handmade mayonnaise.