Kamakura

I apologize for not being on top of this blogging thing and waiting until a week has passed before I add any blog postings. This last week of work was extremely stressful and difficult and required a lot of overtime to keep the ball rolling. Once I got home I was angry at the world especially because I could not talk to my lovely wife from the peace of this apartment I call home. I will get better at this and next week there will be the added bonus of blogs by both Denise and myself. I am sorry that my posts are long, but that is how I roll.

(Wednesday, January 28)

This was the last night I hung out with my good friend Karen before she flew out on Friday. I finally got to experience yakitori. I should be eating yakitori everyday because it is different forms of grilled chicken and other meats. For my seafood allergy this is a great choice for me. I went to the yakitori restaurant nearby the hotel with Karen, Patrick, and Trevor. We sat at the bar and there were two cooks there along with a group of three local Japanese patrons. They have the barbeque coal grill located at the end of the bar that was smoking with someone elses meal.

I ordered some form of chicken, quail eggs, vienna sausage, grilled rice ball, and some vegetable skewers for dinner. All the meals are bite size pieces on skewers that they cook on the grill after you order them. The vegetable skewer was good, but someone gave me some of their asparagus skewer which was even better. It was wrapped in cheese and was almost as good as Sarah's baked asparagus. I am not sure if I was tricked into this, but the chicken I ate was a young chicken and it tasted very spongy. The vienna sausages tasted like little smokies from my Boy Scout days. The quail eggs were awesome and after that I tried some chicken balls which were not awesome. I did not puke, but they just did not taste good. The grilled rice ball was not that great and I would rather just have regular rice.

After we were done eating the cooks started preparing another meal. They greased up a pie dish, laid out a tortilla, and started putting slices of American cheese on top. They put 9 slices of cheese on top, turned the tortilla over and cut of the excess cheese from around the tortilla, then flipped it back to throw some jalapenos on it. They then took it to the back to start baking it. We were mesmerized on what they were making because it looked like a quesadilla. They bring it out, start slicing it up, and actually served it to us. We said it was a quesadilla and the cooks said it was nachos. Lost in translation, but it was very tasty none the less. They said they were testing it out and we were the guinea pigs.

That concluded my last night with Karen before she headed back to Washington.

(Friday, January 30)

After two crappy days at work, I went to an event on base called Nippon Night. It was an evening packed with Japanese culture that included dinner and entertainment. This was the first year they have ever done the event and it was a lot of fun. I went by myself, but met up with and shared a table with Don and Joyce. The night started out with two Japanese ladies playing a Koto which looked like a chello on the ground. The Koto has 13 strings that are plucked by one of three picks worn on the thumb and fingers. It was very soothing music to take your mind of work.

While they were playing the Koto, we helped ourself to the buffet for some authentic Japanese cuisine. They had tempura (fried shrimp), kushiage (beef), sushi, buta no kakuni (pork), steamed cod, and mitsumame (fruit salad). I stayed away from the seafood and just enjoyed the other non seafood items. The food was good, but it was hard to eat because of the entertainment going on. I did not want to look towards my food and miss something on stage.

The first entertainment of the night was the Shi Shi Mai Lion dance which is a January ritual for many Japanese neighborhoods to celebrate the new year. There was some drummers and silly performers. The fun part was the two guys dressed up as flying lions that had some cool masks. The lions left the stage and walked around to bite your head to remove bad spirits and ailments.

After the dancing was a samurai sword fighting performance. The performers play faught on stage with fake looking swords. They even brought in a Kabuki theatre actor who looked like a woman, but actually looked quite different. At the end of the normal performance a 11 year old kid came out and kicked everyone's butt. After the normal performance they grabbed three people from the audience to experience the ways of the samurai. They picked one guy who was 7 feet tall and just towered over the Japanese performers. The crowd people learned a few moves and went through them on stage in a comical matter.

After the samurai performance there was an awesome performance of the taiko drummers. There were eight women and one lead man playing the drums. The noise coming from the drums was quite powerful especially the big drum in the middle. Check out the video and you can get to experience part of the magic. It was a well needed night of relaxation and entertainment to get my mind off of work.

(Sunday, February 1)

This was not Super Bowl Sunday for us, it was a regular day off of work. The Super Bowl was today on Monday. I worked on Saturday, January 31, so there was nothing exciting to talk about. Today, I talked with Denise and my brother-in-law Matt prior to heading off on my adventure to Kamakura. Kamakura was the capitol of Japan in the 12th century and stayed the capitol for 100 years or so. The city is surrounded with Buddhist Temples, Shinto Shrines, and the Great Buddha (Daibutsu).

I headed up to Kamakura with Trevor. It was just the two of us because everyone else I know has already been there. There is too much to see in Kamakura for just one day, so I left a lot to do with Denise when she gets here. Trevor and I took a couple different trains to get to the Hase Station in Kamakura which was the same direction I went to Enoshima Island the week before. From the Hase Station we started walking north towards the Great Buddha. We did not get very far before I saw a temple to the left that looked interesting. We headed towards this temple which happened to be the Hase-Dera Temple.

The Hase-Dera Temple costs us 300 yen to get into, but was well worth the price. The grounds for the temple are beautiful and reminded me of a Japanese Garden with the trees, bushes, and waterways. There was also a cave that we could explore with some stone statues inside. It was a small cave, but it was a lot of fun to explore. We walked around checking out the grounds and taking pictures. We walked up the stairs up the hillside to the halls. There were three halls with bronze statues inside including Daikokuten and Benzaiten. Daikokuten is one of the seven Japanese Gods of Fortune. You could not take pictures of the statues. This temple area was very peaceful. We spent almost two hours just checking out everything. The temple area grounds will be very beautiful in the spring when all the flowers, flowering trees, and bushes come back to life. I can't wait to take Denise there.

After we left the temple, we headed to the Great Buddha. The Great Buddha costs us 200 yen to enter and then another 20 yen to get inside the bronze statue. The Great Buddha is huge and made out of bronze, but was smaller than the stone Buddha I saw at Mt. Nokogiri. It was cool to check out the Buddha, but the rest of the area was quite boring compared to the temple. There was these cool straw sandles on the wall that were huge and I imagine they are big enough to fit Buddha's feet. There were a lot of people at the Great Buddha. After the Great Buddha we walked through town to find some more temples.

We found a few more temples along the way, but nothing nearly as exciting. We finally made it to the Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine which was a huge complex and very busy with people. We got there about the time it started getting dark and cold, so a lot of people were on their way out. They were having some sort of service there with people sitting down and praying in front of some elders. It is hard to explain what they were doing being an outsider like myself. We found a huge pile of sake containers that we had to take a picture in front of. I will have to go back to this magestic place with Denise once she gets here because there was a lot to see and we ran out of time.

It took awhile to get home because we were waiting at the Kamakura Station for 45 minutes since none of our trains were coming or were being cancelled. That sucked since it was getting very cold by then. Once we finally got back to Yokosuka we went to a resturant called the Station Grill and had some hamburgers. The interesting part was the hostess/waitress that sat us was a white, blonde haired girl. I was not sure if I should talk to her with my few Japanese words or use English. It was quite strange since 99% of the people in Japan are Japanese. Food was good and we got done in time for me to get back here to watch Lost. Such a great show, thank you Katrina for getting me hooked.

(Monday, February 2)

Super Bowl Monday! The only problem was that I had to work today. I know this has little to do with Japan, but I am American. The game started at 8:30 am here, so we watched the first three quarters online via gametracker. During the middle of the third quarter we left for an early lunch to watch the remainder of the game. It was a great game to watch, even though the Steelers won. We were watching the game on the Armed Forces Network which does not have any commercials, so hopefully there were no good commercials this year. I got back to my room at a reasonable hour, so that I could Skype my wife since she is staying at her parents this week. I miss her so much and I am super duper excited to see her on Sunday. Let this week pass by super fly fast.