Kamakura

 
So today I went to Kamakura with Silke and Sari. Kamakura is an hour and a half from here on the southern side of Tokyo and was capital of Japan in the 12th century. There's a lot of shrines to see and lots of tourist shopping, but we did the big things - the temple built by the guy who made Kamakura capital, a Great Buddha who used to be in a building like in Nara(but it was washed away in a tsunami in the 1400's), and a temple, as well as hiking along a path from the Great Buddha to a tea ceremony shrine (that was closed). It was a long day and lots of walking. We went to the shrine first, and then on the way back we saw a parade and eventually got to the train, where I got ice cream that was sweet potato flavored - it was purple! We took the train only a few stops to where the Great Buddha was and went to a temple and then to the Buddha. After that, we hiked in the woods past a few shrines (including one where you wash your money and it is supposed to magically multiply) to the train station one closer to Tokyo than the one we got off at... it took us about two hours to walk the whole thing, it was a lot of uphill and downhill (because we were in the mountains) and the trail wasn't very well maintained. There were lots of places where the tree roots were making steps rather than actual steps being put there. The erosion was really bad. But it was pretty. Luckily we got seats on the train when people got off a couple stops after we got on - my feet would hurt a lot if I had had to stand up for the 90 minutes back after hiking so far too. Silke came back to my room and I shared a few marshmellow peeps with her and we played on the computer... which started because she was talking about some german marshmellow candy, but we never found a picture, and then we started looking at wikipedia because they have the same article in English and in German. Now I'm really tired - two late nights in a row. Yesterday night I went to church for Easter since I knew I was going to Kamakura and so I couldn't go this morning, and I didn't get to bed until 11 pm (I didn't get back until around 10:30) and now it is nearly 9:30 pm.