Land of the Deer (aka Miyajima Island)

After Peace Memorial Park and a quick lunch in our hotel room (mostly so Egan could crawl and play), we took the trolley to a ferry so we could visit Miyajima Island. 

It turns out that this weekend was also their annual Oyster festival! Again, we were confronted with really wanting to like oysters, but it's not meant to be...

Miyajima is actually named Itsukushima and it's the home of Itsukushima Shrine. It has a "floating" Torii gate, which is one of the most photographed sites in all of Japan. 

We happened to arrive right at low tide...

 A very nice American family took this for us:

 And that's the actual shrine from the water...

 The island has a number of other buildings and sites - this is the 5-story pagoda...

which is right next to the Daiganji Temple. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the outside of the temple...I was too busy laughing at Tim's giant feet in the tiny slippers...

 I'm not sure why, but rice paddles were very prominent on Miyajima and the temple was no exception! There were giant rice paddles, like the one below, all over...

(Of course Wikipedia has the answer! Evidently the monk who invented the paddle lived on the island.)

 Here's are a few vantages from the Shrine...

 You can see the pagoda and temple on the hill behind Tim in the picture below.

 And this is my new favorite family picture! Even Egan was smiling!

I will look for a picture, but Miyajima Island has TONS of deer. And they are not afraid of humans. In fact, the big ol' rats were quite aggressive in their search for food. On more than one occasion, we saw them snatch bags from unsuspecting tourists and follow people who were eating. Tim almost had to help a lady in a wheelchair when the deer went for her backpack - luckily she got away! Of course, there were plenty of people petting and feeding them, but I moved as far away as possible!! Blech! 

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CupNoodles and Chinatown

One of our first adventures was to the CupNoodles Museum in Yokohama with our friends Eric and Michelle. CupNoodles were invented in the 60s by a poor Japanese man name Momofuku Ando, who (if you believe the museum) is a national treasure in Japan. 

This is one of 3 walls showcasing the history and variety of CupNoodles. There are flavors here I had never heard of - did you know they have seafood curry? Pretty much any flavor you can think of, they've put it into CupNoodles!

My favorite part of the museum was on the 3rd floor. Here we are decorating our OWN CupNoodles! As you can tell, Egan was quite helpful...

 Our finished drawings - Tim and I weren't quite as inspired as Eric & Michelle!

Once you finish decorating your Cup, it's on to the filling and sealing stations. Earlier in our tour (and several times throughout the museum) they tell you how Momofuku revolutionized noodles by filling the cups upside down. We got to crank our cups through the special machine to fill the noodles in correctly. You can also see the toppings station further down. We could do one flavor (seafood, curry, tomato, or original) and four toppings. I believe I added chicken, garlic, green onions, and corn with original flavoring. Tim had cheese in his and did the tomato flavoring!

Here are Eric and Michelle modeling our finished CupNoodles. Yep, they provide a small balloon package to keep it safe during transport!

This was one of exhibits the museum created to demonstrate creative thinking. It's all about perspective!

Momofuku Ando!

After the walking through the museum, we decided to head over to Chinatown. Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Japan and for some reason we never visited the first time we came! Thankfully Eric and Michelle knew their way around and we feel pretty confident about visiting again in the future.

This large gate is the entrance - it was pretty astounding.

Tim and Egan walking down the street - I don't know if this picture gives a good enough impression of how crowded it was in the street. It was definitely a busy place!

There were hundreds of restaurants and the aroma in the street was delicious! In Japan, many of the restaurants have display cases outside of their menu items. We saw this monstrosity next to a full display case - do you think we could order it??

 And, of course, Chinatown wouldn't be complete without a few beautiful shines sprinkled throughout the area.

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Japanese Gold Rush

I think Japan can tell that our time is coming to end shortly.  It's been pulling out all of the stops, it terms of weather.  Yesterday was in the low-70s and it's supposed to continue to get better!  Well, even though Tim was working, I couldn't just sit at home and not enjoy that!  So I hopped on the bus/train(s) and made my way to  Kamakura. You might be thinking, "she's been there, like, 4 times...why does she keep going back?!"  Because there is so much to see!

Unfortunately, this is what the train looked like when I got on at our home stop:

Why is this bad?  Because this is what Kamakura looked like when I got off:

Here's a comparison shot from our last trip, taken at the same temple:

The pictures don't do it justice.  It was the worst crowd situation I have been in this whole trip, with the exception of Tokyo Rush Hour train.  Why was it so crowded?  It's Golden Week!  A whole week of national holidays in Japan.  People come out by the droves!  

After getting stuck in this crowd, I veered off to a side street and ran into this:

After having a bit of a laugh over that, I kept elbowing my way through the crowd to find another empty road.  I managed to find a sign pointing me towards the Jufukuji Temple and I set off.  Thankfully this road was much, much less crowded and took me through a part of Kamakura I had yet to see.  One of the interesting things about Japan are the number of railroad crossings.  I ended up having to wait for one of the JR trains to pass...

I'm glad that I tried to find this temple, it was gorgeous! 

It is the oldest zen temple and the third highest ranking out of the five principle zen temples in Kamakura.  At the entrance I read a sign that said that in the hillside behind the temple are some "Yagura" or medieval tunnel graves.  They shelter five tiered pagodas, said to be the final resting place of a former Shogun and his mother.  There are also some other famous Japanese people buried here. 

I decided to wander back to the main shopping street, but the crowds were overwhelming, so I got some blueberry fro-yo and headed towards the train station.  Even the train platform was crowded!

Fortunately, almost 90% of these people were headed in the Tokyo direction and by the time my train came, the crowds had thinned out considerably.  

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Kama...Kama...Kamakura

We were expecting rain on Saturday, but thankfully that never materialized!  Instead, it was perfect weather for a trip to Kamakura.  This was our 2nd trip together and my fourth trip to the ancient capital of Japan, which goes to show how much there is to see!  I love how close we are, a short 20-30 minute train ride, and how full of culture the area is.  This time, our destination was Tsurugaoka-Hachimangu Shrine and Komachi-Dori street.

With it being Saturday and nice out, the streets were surprisingly uncrowded (for Japan) and we had a pleasant time admiring the scenery!

When we got to the shrine, there was a wedding party taking photos...

The bride and groom are in the center in the front row.  The group was a mixture of traditional kimonos and modern semi-formal wear.

After some semi-disgusting hot dog/sausage things...

we climbed the steps to the actual shrine. 

There are two museums on the property, the National Treasure Museum and the Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, but we opted out of visiting them.  Instead, we took an alternate route down from the shrine...

and accidentally ended up in wedding video!

Whoops!

We ended up walking around the grounds, away from some of the larger crowds.  We found some other small shrines...

A lotus pond...

and an albino pigeon.

This shrine has a very steep/large arch bridge at the entrance, but we couldn't get anyone to take our picture for us, so we had to make due with Tim's long arms.

The shrine is located at the end of Dankazura Street, which was probably beyond gorgeous when the cherry blossoms were blooming...

Those are all cherry blossom trees lining the road, which is actually more a promenade set up between the actual streets.  I found the crosswalk to the shrine one of the most interesting so far in Japan...

There are over 6 different crosswalks in this intersection! INSANITY!

We ended our day shopping on Komachi-Dori Street.  Surprisingly we've spent very little time shopping for actual souvenirs and this is the perfect shopping area for traditional and modern Japanese goods! 

Look forward to more posts this week, I've got a lot lined up! :-)

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