After 5 days in the big city of Tokyo, my family wanted to venture out into the suburbs a bit. I took them to the historical and beautiful city of Kamakura. Kamakura was the center of Japan during about the 1200s during the Kamakura era. First, we made a stop to Enoshima Island. I had never been to Enoshima before so I was very excited to see what people love about it. We had to walk a bridge to get to the island.
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| The bridge |
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| The island |
The streets were narrow and just lined with small restaurants, tourists shops, and fish markets. We walked up the main path and ran into a temple.
From there we had a choice to: take the escalator (a paid service) or the stairs to explore the island. My Dad's knee is a little out of whack so we chose the escalator. It was a good life choice. We went up about 5 or 6 steep flights of escalators to get to the main attractions of the island. After two flights of stairs, we came to the main temple. The god at this temple is supposed to bring special luck to those in love. There were a ton of red and pink votives hung all over in trees as prayers for love.
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| There was a line to get in and pray as it was the day after New Years |
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| There were dozens of these racks all filled up |
We then made our way up higher to get to the gardens. We stopped on the way to sit above the sea and have lunch. Also, there was a comedy show going on in front of the gardens so we stopped to check that out. Japanese humor is so funny! They do a lot of slapstick and facial expressions.
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| The view from lunch |
After our detours, we got to the gardens. Needless to say, in the middle of winter there were some plants and trees but most were dead. It was still interesting to see though! The garden dead ends into the Sea Candle an observatory deck for Kamakura. On really clear good days you can see Fuji and sometimes all the way to Tokyo. Lucky for us, it was actually a clear day! Mom was ecstatic to get a glimpse of Mt. Fuji! It was super windy up there though but way worth it!
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| The Sea Candle |
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| Kamakura |
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| Mt. Fuji |
We glanced down at our watches and panicked a bit because there was still one thing that we had to see before leaving Kamakura: the Daibutsu (Great Buddha). See, almost all historical places here close by 5 and it was already 3:15 and we still had to get back to the train and take the train to Hase. We sprinted to the train. We got on the train just in time. We took the historical rail line called the Endo line. We got fantastic views of the sun setting over the island and Fuji.
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| Enoshima Island |
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| Fuji |
As soon as the train hit the station, my brother and I literally ran to get some tickets to see the Daibutsu. We got there just in time! They told us we had 10 minutes which was fine by us! My family gasped when they saw it. It really is awesome to behold. It was especially interesting for me too since I'd never been there at close. We were the last ones there. It was so cool to be the only ones with this massive presence.
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| The family with the Great Buddha |
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| Not a soul there except us... |
We headed back to Fujisawa to catch our train and had dinner at an Italian restaurant where I proudly was able to read about 85% of the katakanna for the family. It was a very fun and educational day for the family.
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| My brother with the Endo line historical train :) |
