Travels: Japan 2014 Wednesday

Wednesday - This was our Japanese temple/shrine day. Leanna drove us to Kamakura where we spent the day hopping on different trains and visiting different temple sites. The following pics are not necessarily in order of the temples visited.

We bought some rice balls at a Family Mart for our lunch. We didn't know which flavor we were getting since the labels were in Japanese, but they turned out pretty good.

These beautiful flowers were common at some of the temple sites.

Hasedera was a shrine which had The Goddess of Mercy with eleven heads. She was pretty impressive. We met the cutest group of Japanese women there. We offered to take their group picture, and they were so cute about it. They wanted pictures with all of us as well. They charmed us with their cute smiles and sweetness.

We love how men in uniform, like policeman or security guards, are so helpful. If they approach you, it's not to tell you you're doing something wrong, it's to help you-- offer to take a picture or direct you somewhere. When we were taking our pictures with the group of cute ladies, the security guard held back people so they wouldn't ruin our picture.

One of many train stations we frequented

Charming walkway up to the temple

The last shrine was Tsurugaoka Hachimangu. We enjoyed the charming walk up to it, and it was mostly cool to look at from a distance.

One of two guardians each temple has. They keep out evil spirits.

While walking along the road we saw a octopus chip stand. We stopped and watched the whole process of taking octopus and making it into a huge chip. It was quite fascinating. However, after a couple of bites we decided we didn't care for it at all.

Octopus cracker
Watch the demo below...

This shrine was the money-washing shrine. They believe if you wash your money there, it will bring you greater fortune.

This shrine had a fox theme...tons of little foxes were lined up and all around the shrine.

We took quite a hike through nature and then made our way to the Buddha shrine. Buddha was gigantic!

We ate our dinner at a sidewalk joint that said Casual Japanese Dining. We enjoyed some things, and not others. We feel we really have done our duty in eating authentic Japanese food.

Close to our hotel

In our hotel room. Leanna slept on this tatami mat where shoes are not allowed. We're glad our tables at home have regular chairs.

Okay, tonight was definitely a first. We made it to Hakone, and we're staying in the Senkei Hotel. They have a nice Onsen which is a public bath up on the roof. You get naked, bathe yourself and then get in the very warm semi-shallow pool of very warm water. Yep! We did that. Only because we were the only ones there at the time and it's such a Japanese thing to do! Ha! At one point we sat together on a short rock shelf and we decided that even though we were bum to bum on the rickshaw, we had never sat quite THAT bum to bum! We got some good laughs!