Spring Break

It's spring break here. Spring break, though, is not really a "break". All the teachers still go to school, and students still go to school for club activities. Lucky us, though, we ALTs give English lessons to the community during the school breaks. It's great on so many levels - instead of an hour commute, I have a 5 second commute (just going down to the meeting room on the ground floor of our apartment building). Classes are just from 9 am to noon, so I get to sleep in AND finish early! And we all share the teaching responsibilities, so each ALT leads one or two classes, and just assists with the remaining classes. Not a bad gig for two weeks.

Spring is here, definitely, although it's not consistently warm yet. I can't wait until summer! Seriously, I want to know when I get dressed in the morning that it will simply be hot. I hate wondering: will be cool or warm, rainy or sunny?? Do I need a sweater, T-shirt, jacket, umbrella, sunglasses - maybe all of the above? Can I wear capris or a skirt or will I regret it? Makes getting dressed too complicated! Bring on summer!!

Anyway, back to the real topic of this post - my weekend trip to Nikko! Because it's spring break, the railway offers a special ticket - basically as far as you can go within one day for $22. Heather and I decided we'd show them how far we can go! Last Thursday, we used a ticket to travel from Himeji to Tokyo. I'll simply mention that a shinkansen trip from Himeji to Tokyo costs $150 and takes 4 hours. Instead, we did it for $22 and 14 hours... We're still not sure it was worth it...

We left at 8 am on Thursday with our handy "timetable" listing all the transfers we'd have to make along the way. All went smoothly for the first two hours, until we got on a train which didn't depart on schedule. We were puzzled, until I overheard the word "jiko" (A quick aside - knowing Swahili has come in surprisingly handy here - only because I can associate words that sound the same in Swahili and Japanese. So when I heard "jiko", I thought of the Swahili word for stove (also "jiko") and I used my random memory trick to remember that in Japanese "jiko" is accident (think of a stove accident). Heather witnessed this in action as I muttered the word jiko a few times trying to remember the connection - ah-ha!! "stove" => "accident")

Having some connections between trains only 4 minutes apart, the initial 40 minute delay turned into us arriving in Tokyo two hours later than expected. But we found our hostel and got a bit of sleep.

In the morning, we headed to the nearest convenience store, joking about how sad it is that we often get a complete breakfast there. We grabbed orange juice, yogurt and a pastry and walked on towards our first sightseeing destination. But what did we see along the way?? A Denny's!! Yes!! We immediately decided our convenience store breakfast would be better eaten as snacks later in the day. I ordered the french toast and Heather the scrambled eggs and toast (no Grand Slam breakfast on the menu in Tokyo. But the Denny's bathroom was as gross as you'd expect a Denny's bathroom to be).

Across the street from Denny's was our first sightseeing stop of the day: Senso-ji temple. It's the oldest temple in Tokyo. On the back of one of the buildings was an enormous pair of straw sandals, apparently for one of the gods' use.

The sign in the background of this photo shows the proper protocol for rinsing your hands and mouth at a temple or shrine.

Although it was only 10 am, the vendors around the temple were already setting up their stands to sell squid and octopus on a stick. Luckily I was still full from my Denny's breakfast!

Not unusually, there was a shrine within the temple grounds where we saw this cat taking a nap under the shisha statue.

Surprisingly the cherry blossoms were at their peak that weekend in Tokyo (they're not yet at their peak here in Himeji, which is further south than Tokyo). After seeing the temple and shrine, we took a stroll down a riverside park which was full of sakura (cherry blossoms).

Next on our itinerary was the restaurant wholesale district. But on the way, we noticed this advertisement, quite possibly for raw beef sushi. I continually ask "what will they think of next", but there's always something stranger and less appetizing.

We knew when we'd found the restaurant wholesale district.

Heather's main objective while in Tokyo was to buy some plastic food. Many restaurants have displays of plastic food outside, giving a useful visual of their menu. And apparently Asakusa in Tokyo is THE place to buy this plastic food! Here's the store where Heather purchased her bowl of plastic udon.

Once that task was accomplished we were back on the train to Nikko. I'll post about that in a separate blog - but here is one last photo of Tokyo, where even the subway station entrances look like temples!