We walked across our usual bridge, the weather was better but everything was still a little wet and foggy from the rain the day before. We got to the temple without really knowing what to expect. As soon as we saw the whole thing we realized what an amazing site we'd been missing. The area spans an entire block and is full of statues and small gardens. The entryway is gigantic and various people would stop in front of it to bow and say a prayer before continuing on. The area past the entry is a long stretch of street where various shops operate during the day. We hung around the temple taking pictures and observing the customs while we waited for the stores to open so we could get some shopping done.
Each side of the entry had a deity of some sort
We were still early so none of the shops were open yet. They all had paintings on the gates.
One of the few places we've been to where being early was a better experience
This area actually made us both a little sad due to the purpose of the memorial as described in the next picture:
People were coming up to this and taking scoops of water to cleanse their mouth and their hands. We didn't want to disturb anyone so we just observed.
The Koi were all bunched up in this small area of the river.
This bell was used during the Edo period to tell time, the priests still ring it at 6am every day
The temple itself. We stood inside for a long time just watching people come up and toss in some coins and say a prayer. The inner area had an enormous room full of golden items and beautiful decorations. We didn't end up taking a picture out of respect.
Fortunes:
After walking around and taking these pictures we spotted the area where you can get a fortune. It was still pretty early and not too many people were around so we were able to get video of us getting our fortunes:
Of course Chrissy gets the best fortune possible.
Those sticks were hard to get out, I could see them in there but they weren't lining up with the hole. My fortune said it was normal but seemed pretty good to me. I almost wish one had been bad so we could have tied it on there and grabbed another. Maybe we'll stop in again before heading out to Kyoto.
Lunch:
We had seen about everything there was to see at the temple itself so we were anxious for the stores to start opening. We still had about an hour before that would really kick in so we decided to get some sushi to hold us over and kill some time. We walked the streets for a while stopping to check any signs that had pictures of food on them. We found one sushi place and walked in. Standing for a few minutes in an empty restaurant is more awkward than I had realized. The chef just stayed in the back not acknowledging us despite having seen us come in. We decided that we had just entered a closed restaurant and promptly walked out.
Further down the road we spotted another sushi place, this one was also devoid of customers but the chef and waiter were standing there and greeted us wholeheartedly. We sat down and the waiter brought out the English menu for us. Most places have menus in English for the many foreign visitors. We do the usual grunt and point and select a few choice pieces of sushi. We have eaten so much sushi over the last few years that most of the "weirder" items don't really faze us all that much. Eel? Love it. Roe? One of our favorites. Squid/Octopus? Not huge fans but doesn't bother us. This place had one item that stuck out for us though.
What you see there would be sushi made with horse meat (sorry Mom). I got mine raw and Chrissy got the seared option. It ended up looking and tasting almost exactly like roast beef to both of us. The texture was a bit different but the flavor was pretty standard stuff. Still, we have now joined a very exclusive club of people especially hated by PETA.
We also noticed something rather humorous in this place that we want to do some follow up investigation on. Every seat had the Japanese menu in front of it, including ours. When the waiter brought out the English menu he didn't take the Japanese one. I was pointing at the items on my menu to the chef and decided that it might be easier to use the Japanese one. It was then that I noticed that every item on the English menu was about 10 yen more expensive than the same thing on the Japanese menu. I wasn't able to check to see what amount we were charged, it could just be that one menu wasn't updated with newer prices, but this is definitely something to look for in the future. In the end though if they want to charge $0.10 more per item to deal with me not knowing their language that seems fine, I just want to know if it is happening.
Shopping:
We got back to the Temple area right around the time most of the shops were opening. This is a very tourist heavy attraction so the items were basically Japanese flea market items. Keychains, cheap kimonos, random robot figures and tons of sweet snacks. The whole Street was filled with people.
We didn't end up buying any items but we did find the sweet shops too good to pass up. We got a fried sesame roll with red bean paste inside that was fantastic. Then we stopped into some place that was selling these three balls on a stick with a glaze over them. Chrissy made the good call and said we could split one. We immediately regretted our decision to stop here. We tried desperately to finish this horrible atrocity of a dessert and got out of there. We needed to cleanse our palette so we hit one of the many soft-serve ice cream places in the area. These places are amazing. They have tons of very exotic and unique flavors. Chrissy got Sweet Potato and I got a Green Tea and Milk swirl.
After all this we decided to head back to the apartment to regroup and rest a bit before heading out to our next stop: The Tokyo Skytree...
One thing that we came across today that is worth mentioning is about businesses being open vs. closed here. We may be missing some important key to understanding this but we are having a very difficult time figuring this out with some places. Typically in the States when you see that the lights are on and the doors are open, this means they are open for business. In addition the "Open" sign is either going to show as on or off and the hours will be listed. It could be that the signs are in Japanese and we are just missing them but we have found very few businesses with listed hours. There are no "Open" or "Closed" signs to speak of. The lights could be on and the door could be open but there may not be anyone there.
The typical indicator here that a business is open is that they have pulled their wares and signs out in front of the shop. You can see in the picture above that they have displays that are brought out. Seriously though, this does not always mean that they are open. Thankfully, in most places there are shutters that are rolled down over the front of the shop and if they are open all the way then they are open. For those places that do not use this technique it is sort of hit or miss.
I think it is something that the people here grow up understanding. There is obviously some sort of queue that we are missing though. This is brought up because twice today we ran into situations where we were very much confused. The first was described above, about walking into the unattended restaurant. The second is that there is a shop on the corner of a very busy tourist area that we really wanted to visit but was not open with the rest of the shops. We checked back several hours later and it still was not open. Does it just have very limited hours? Does it not open on Wednesdays? We don't have a clue!
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