Kamakura And Bunnies

This morning we got an earlier start so we could try to beat the rain. We took the train south about an hour to Kamakura, which is a seaside resort city with dozens of Buddhist Zen temples and Shinto shrines. We started by going to Hase-dera. It has many different gardens and statues but the most well known one is Kannon, which is one of the largest wooden statues in Japan. It's gilded in gold and has eleven heads, which is said to represent the different phases of enlightenment. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take any pictures of it. There was also a nice ocean view from the temple grounds. And there was an underground cave which is a long winding tunnel with low ceilings and various statues throughout.

From there we walked to Kotoku-in Temple, which is a Buddhist temple that houses a huge Buddha statue. They date the statue in 1252 and is made of bronze. The temple that housed it was destroyed by a storm in 1334, rebuilt, damaged in another storm in 1369, rebuilt again, and then it was washed away in a tsunami and now the Buddha stands in the open air. It also survived an earthquake and has since been updated so that it would more easily withstand larger earthquakes. It stands almost 44 feet tall and weighs approximately 93 tons. The statue is hollow and Matt and I paid the 20 yen each (less than 20 cents) to go inside. It was really interesting to see how they merged the different plates together.

To get to our next destination we walked along a really cool street, which might've been called Komachi street. It had lots of shops and restuarants and interesting dessert places. We grabbed lunch there of tempura shrimp and soup, since it was cold and rainy. We also wandered into this honey place which had many different flavored honeys to sample. It was delicious! You could try it plain and then also put it in both hot and cold water, which turned it into a sweetened flavor water. It was really good no matter how you had it and we seriously considered buying some but we weren't sure how to get it home. There was also another street in Kamakura which you could take that's completely lined with Cherry Blossoms but they weren't bloomed yet so we didn't go down that street.

Our destination was Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu. It is said to be the most important Shinto shrine in the city of Kamakura and it's at the geographical and cultural center of the city. It used to be both a Hachiman shrine and also a Tendai Buddhist temple. 

At this point we were tired of the cold and rain so we took the train back to Tokyo and met up with Jack at the airbnb. We rested for a bit before deciding to try another classic Tokyo activity: an animal cafe. We choose a rabbit cafe and took the train over there. It was titled Mimi Rabbit cafe. It was really interesting and not quite what I expected; it was basically just a small apartment with a ton of rabbits and rabbit cages. The "cafe" part was just a small corner of the room where they made us a drink that we didn't actually get until we were almost ready to leave. You pay to be there for either half an hour or an hour and a drink is usually included. So we sat there for an hour and played with the different bunnies and fed them. They gave us shoes and aprons to wear to protect our clothes, since the bunnies pooped and peed everywhere. They also had baby otters! That was random but we got to play with them for a bit too before they put them back in their cages. We picked this particular place because it had lots of bunnies roaming around at all times, whereas we had read at some of the other ones they would only have one or two bunnies out at a time and you may not actually get any attention from it. Here they were all over us. It was awesome. There are a ton of other animal cafes here: cats, dogs, owls, hedgehogs, snakes, etc. Here are some pictures:

Then we met up with our friend Taryn for dinner, she used to work at Epic as well. She took us to a Shabu Shabu restaurant which is a self-cook Japanese hot pot type place. It was all you can eat and they would bring you plates of meat that you would put in the pot to cook. You would also put vegetables and noodles in there as well. It was really good! It was also a nice social meal since it was easy to hold conversations as we were cooking the food. Unfortunately I forgot to get any pictures of dinner. :( But I also tried sake for the first time! So that was cool. They also had ice cream with sprinkles so I was super happy.

Then we went back to Shibuya crossing (the busiest intersection in the world that we went to a few days ago) since we were so close to it and this time we went up to the second-floor Starbucks and watched the crossings from above. I have a video in the google album linked on the right. It was mesmerizing watching the crossings with all of the umbrellas. Then as we were leaving we participated in the crossing again and this time we got some pictures of us in them:

So that's it for today! We've really been loving Japan so far. It's a super cool place and I can't wait to see more of it.