E's day in Kamakura

My sweet husband gets to travel to Asia quite often for his job, he is so darn lucky! Today he is headed home from his third trip to Japan. He will be returning to Japan, again, in three weeks! This time he only flew out for one day-long meeting. I know, crazy. So instead of turning around and flying directly home, he decided to take one day and explore a town called Kamakura in Japan that we visited last year when we went to Japan together. There are so many temples in Kamakura we hardly made a dent last year, so this year he decided to try to see a few more.

Here is a portion of his email to me, I just love it:

My day in Kamakura went pretty well, although not as well as it could have because you weren’t there! I got on the train no problem and took it to the lower station (which is actually called “Kamakura”, the place we got off is one station before and is called “Kita Kamakura”). Once there I was not having the best time, however, because that station isn’t actually that close to anything, unlike the Kita Kamakura station. It’s in kind of a downtown area, and all the temples are a fair walk and I had no idea which way to go (because I didn’t have my navigating baby!). Fortunately I had a cell signal so I got on Google maps, which wasn’t super helpful since it was all in Japanese but at least that way I was able to get my bearings and head in the right direction.

So after a 1.9 kilometer walk I ended up at Hase Dera temple, and it was definitely worth it. I was thinking the whole time how much you would have loved this place! The temple complex goes up a hill side so the gate is at the bottom and you slowly work your way up the hill past waterfalls and sub temples. Oh, and I certainly can’t forget the cave! This temple had a cave that you could go into that had several rooms and passages in between. Inside the cave were just a few lights and candles lighting up various carved figures. In one room I totally thought of you because people had placed little mini bodhisattva figures with prayers written on the bottom all over the place, it was really cool!

Once you got to the top of the hill there was a patio overlooking the ocean and the main temple building has a really huge statue of the bodhisattva Kannon that was really pretty. This was definitely one of the coolest temples and we will for sure have to check it out when we come back.

After that I decided to work my way over to the Great Buddha, but I was also getting hungry so I stopped for lunch on the way at this little tiny noodle restaurant and ordered a bowl of Udon noodle soup with fried tofu. It was very tasty! After lunch I stopped by a soft serve ice cream stand and ordered a vanilla/chestnut twist that was amazing!

Then I went to the Great Buddha. This was also really neat because it’s a big bronze Buddha statue and it is really old (built in 1262). I hung out here and relaxed for a while. There were not really any other temples very close and it has started raining so I decided to head to the train station and jot up to Kita Kamakura. Once there I went to one of the Zen temples right near the train station that we had already visited, but it was fun to go again, and then I tried finding another one nearby but I was never able to (again, I need my navigator!), and at this point I was getting very very tired, so I decided to head back to Tokyo and my hotel.

Here are some photos:
Hase Dera Temple - Kamakura
Tiny prayer figures inside the cave.
Exit to the cave complex. Doesn't this look awesome?
Great Buddha of Kamakura
Buddha detail
To see the rest o E's shots, check out his Flickr here.