Kamakura to Kyoto

I woke up surprisingly late and rested on Sunday – it was bright in the room early, but when I finally stirred it was raining! Neither of us were anxious to go anywhere in the rain, so we took our time and both marveled at how well we slept considering how freaked out we were about the bugs….

Breakfast sushi

After booking a hostel for the evening in Kyoto and Stefan arranging his plans to get back to Tokyo, we left the spider cave to get breakfast. Stefan knew of a take-out sushi place, so we grabbed boxes of breakfast sushi (mmmm, raw fish for breakfast!) and found a temple courtyard to eat in. It was great to sit surrounded by the quiet and the cool stone walls, and we listened to the rain fall while we ate our sushi.

We took the long way back to the house, and stopped at a few more temples. Each one was different in its own little way, and even though they were beginning to blend together, we agreed that they all had a nice sense of calm and beauty.

When I realized it was after noon, we made an actual effort to get back, pack up, and head to the train! I still had to go back to Yokohama, get my bag, get to the bullet train, and make it to Kyoto!

We were NOT sad to get out of the house, and we locked the key right back in the box and didn’t look back. Stefan was a great guide, but maybe next time I agree to go on a spontaneous overnight trip, I’ll ask to have a say in the accommodations ;P

We got back on the train, but I was a little sad to be saying goodbye! Most people kind of scattered on Friday and I didn’t get to say “sayonara” to many of my classmates in person, and saying bye to Stefan made me realize how quickly the week had flown by! But alas, we were obliged to part ways in Yokohama.

Bullet train!

I wasn’t paying attention, and totally got on the wrong train when I was making my connection back to the hotel (two train lines on one track…sneaky!!). After going back to where I could get the right train, I realized how late it was! Doing the math, I discovered there was no way I was going to get to Kyoto before 9pm, so I had to e-mail my dinner date and postpone: a former labmate of mine, a Japanese professor named Masa, had offered to show me around and introduce me to his new lab members!

Eventually I got my bags, found my way to the bullet train station, and bought a ticket! I was actually really excited to ride the “shinkansen!” The pictures of them looked so cool!!

Dinner

I asked for a window seat and grabbed a dinner bento box from one of the vendors in the station. I never know what food I’m actually ordering, but all the pictures and plastic models of the food looked good, so I just chose one.

Rice, veggies, and who knows?

I went to the platform a little early so I could watch the trains – they really ARE cool!! They are so sleek and fancy looking, and they move so quietly compared to the other trains. I threw down my bags and took a few pictures, but was the target of a few angry security whistles for being past the arbitrary yellow lines on the platform while I was enthusiastically snapping away :P

But soon enough, my train arrived and I got on and found my seat. It was a lot like Coach on an airplane (smallish seats, little overhead space), but I was still psyched, and I settled in for the ride. I ate my bento dinner and watched the scenery whip by, but by the time the light was fading I passed out. I woke up in what felt like a minute and we were arriving in Kyoto!

They are SO FAST! It was awesome!

After two more local train rides, I made it to my hostel and was pleasantly surprised to have the whole 4-bed room to myself. I was drained, and I went to bed not too long after my arrival :)

Sunny Beach Saturday in Kamakura

The hike to our house

I woke up to a warm and sunny day, and was psyched to get to the beach! After our last hotel breakfast, Stefan and I set out for the coast! I left my giant bag at the hotel and just packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush, and was happy to be headed towards the ocean.

A little more rural than Yokohama

Since Stefan had already been to Kamakura the week before, he got to play tour guide. It was kind of great to be guided for once, and I had no idea where we were going, staying, or what we were doing! Stefan had booked beds for us through Airbnb (the website I had used to rent out my extra room in the past!), and I was looking forward to being out of the city, out of the hotel, and sightseeing.

Dead end? Go up!

We made it to Kamakura in about 40 minutes, took the bus a few stops from the station, and got out in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I was so lucky that Stefan had prepared, because the place would have been IMPOSSIBLE to find. I cannot accurately describe how out of the way it was. First, we walked down a few winding “streets,” but the streets of the little town more closely resembled paved sidewalks in dimensions.

The view!

 After winding through back neighborhoods, we came to what I would have described as a dead end before I knew any better. The street stopped and there were only driveways and a small winding staircase that lead up a hill. We attempted to ask people about the address, but most addresses in Japan don’t make any sense (many are numbered in the order they were built and not in the order they appear on the street), so we decided to take our chances and hike up the hill.

It's clear boys live here

We never found the numbered house, but I found a house at the top of the hill with a lockbox on the door…Stefan tried the combination he had been emailed, and miraculously it worked! On the way to the house, Stefan told me that our host had been in a motorbike accident and was spending the night in the hospital, so we might have the whole house if the roommate wasn’t around.


When we walked into the house I instantly knew that it was solely occupied by young men. There was crap everywhere, the bathroom was less than clean, and I won’t even give you details about the state of the kitchen. Our rooms were on the 2nd floor, and when we got up there it was about 98 degrees.

The beach!

We were anxious to get right out of there, so we donned bathing suits and escaped as fast as possible! Stefan led us through town to the beach. We strolled past SO MANY temples! Kamakura is a popular day trip from Tokyo and most people travel there to see the temples, and even more go in June to see the blooming hydrangeas. It was incredibly hot, and by the time we reached the water, we both threw down our things and got right in!

BIG Buddha

The beach itself was surrounded by green hills and was full of families and surfers. The water was perfect, and after swimming out to the buoys and back, we sat on shore watching the kids and the birds and I just enjoyed hearing the waves. I realized it had been a while since I had even swum in the ocean, and I was glad I decided to skip a day of Kyoto and see the sea!



Once we felt like we were getting overly roasted and hungry we left the sand in search of shade and food…on the way we got distracted by no less than 4 or 5 huge temples. We got totally caught up in sight seeing, and ended up heading in the direction of one of Kamakura’s main attractions: the giant Buddha!

Stefan hadn’t seen it yet, so we went inside the temple that housed the Diabutsu. It was actually pretty cool! He was huge and looked incredibly wise and peaceful! Apparently you can even walk inside him for a small fee, but Stefan inquired to some other tourists who said there was nothing inside and that it was not worth the wait.

Stefan hiking

After seeing the giant Buddha, we left the temple and found a hiking trail and decided to go for it. Unfortunately, we still hadn’t found any food, but in the name of adventure, and escaping the insane crowds, we hiked up the hills around the city. It was great! From the top we had a view of the little cove we had swam in, and we toured a few smaller, empty temples on the way.


We both enjoyed the flowers and the views and the serenity, but we were starving by the end, and made the long-ish walk back to the main part of town to find food! We had some yummy ramen and a well-deserved cold beer. But after the meal we were hot, tired, and salty from the long day, so we went back to the house to get cleaned up.

On the way, Stefan was tempted by a Japanese barbeque place. He grabbed a skewer of chicken breast and a skewer of chicken hearts (not even close to the weirdest choice available). He polished off the first one, and as we started walking away with the second, something brushed by my ear – before I even knew what happened it was too late!

A hawk had swooped down, tried to grab the skewer right out of his hand, and flew away!! How crazy is that?! The hawk missed and the skewer landed at our feet, so the bird kept circling for a while. I grabbed the skewer and stuck it into the top of a nearby chain link fence, but the hawk gave up and flew away.

After the excitement, we walked all the way through the town, back through our little neighborhood, and hiked up our hill to the house. We paused for a few minutes by the little river to feed the GIANT carp and koi swimming in the river – there were even some turtles and ducks that came swimming up, tempted by the bread Stefan chucked to them.

Feeding fishies

We got back to the house, but there was still nobody home….however when I was grabbing my fresh clothes and towel, I spotted something moving – when I stopped to look, I realized it was a HUGE spider.

Evil spider

Look people – I am in no way squeamish or overly afraid of crawly creatures, but this thing was GINORMOUS. It sensed me looking at it, and I’m pretty sure it broke land speed records as it raced around the corner as I screamed like a little girl for Stefan to come look. He seemed even less pleased than I was, and we decided to attempt to kill it. BUUUUUT since it’s Japan, and we had to take our shoes off at the door, we were lacking weapons! Stefan grabbed one of the ubiquitous pillows, aimed, and hurled it at the Godzilla-sized arachnid.

Wonder what the sign says?

Well, he scored a direct hit….but I’m pretty sure the spider palmed the pillow, paused, and hurled it back. After which it scurried down the ceiling of the stairway and out of sight. By this point we were both squeeling like little girls! Stefan tried, unsuccessfully, one more time with the pillow before I was afraid the thing would get away…so I gathered my courage and a Swiffer, and climbed down the stairs, passing under the creepy spider to get a better angle of attack.

It took two tries, a LOT of “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwww!”s, but I finally killed it! Stefan even took the thing outside and pulverized it beyond recognition with my shoe to “make sure it wasn’t playing dead,” hahaha! We went back upstairs, I showered as quickly as possible (I found two more medium spiders IN the shower), and we agreed to escape the house for as long possible.

On the way out, we killed two more and a cockroach for good measure, and ran down the mountain as fast as we could to find a sake strong enough to make the whole “animals attacking us at every turn” situation a bit more acceptable.

We walked down to the ocean to see if there were any beach bar, but all we found were kids lighting fireworks in the sand. I was quite jealous, and when we stopped to grab a travel beer at the convenience store, I grabbed some sparklers! We went back to the beach and watched the other fireworks and lit our little ones, too! I tried to write my name, but evidently my sparkler-handwriting is even worse than my conventionally bad handwriting, and all my pictures were illegible. Stefan on the other hand was quite talented!


He tried to teach me how to improve my skills by showing me how to point the camera at the moon and using its light to paint my name in the dark with a long exposure….but I sucked at it! We ran out of sparklers, so we went back to the main drag to see if there were any bars open in Kamakura.

The town was almost completely deserted, but in desperate search for a bathroom, we walked upstairs to a place that had music and voices floating out onto the street.  It ended up be a cozy little place with big overstuffed chairs, classic rock music, and friendly staff. We had a few shochus, and struck up a conversation with the bartender.


My first question was about the spiders – when asked if the gargantuan size was normal, he said yes. When asked if they were scary, he said no and that from a young age they are taught not to kill them because they “eat the cockroaches.” The prospect of more large spiders and enough cockroaches to sustain the number of spiders we had already dispatched made me order another drink and wish I wasn’t sleeping on the floor….

I'll have....what he's having?

We had a good time chatting with the Japanese bartender and the other patrons, but eventually we got tired and brave enough to make the dark uphill hike to our spider den, so we made the trek back. I will say that I keenly remember not wanting to turn on any lights so that I didn’t see anything, getting into “bed” (aka lying on the floor, with no AC, in the 86 degree room) and hoping I didn’t have any arachnid-inspired dreams.

Sleeping on the floor...

I survived the night…..and all things considered, it was a really awesome day of swimming in the ocean, soaking up the sun, temples and shrines, hiking, and even some fireworks!

The end of Science Summer Camp

Well, as can be imagined, I didn’t exactly spring out of bed on Friday morning! Since Stefan and I were in the same boat, we met up for a late breakfast on the way to the conference. We were a bit late though, so we opted to skip food, grab coffees, and make it in time for a couple talks and the lunch break. We rolled in just in time to sign in and catch the last two talks :P

When the lunch break finally arrived and a few of us gathered to decide on something to eat, I discovered I wasn’t the only one dragging a bit, haha! Some of the girls wanted McDonald’s, so I caved and went with them. I’m not going to lie, it was delicious. I would be more ashamed, but I’ll just pretend that I was drug there against my will ;)

On the Ferris wheel!

It was a gorgeous sunny day, and we sat outside in the sun and ate. It had been so grey and dreary the past few days, and we finished lunch with about 45 minutes left in our break, so a bunch of us decided to go ride the giant ferris wheel!! We grabbed a cabin with a glass floor, and started the slow ascent and descent. According to the occasional English narration, it would take us 16 minutes to go around the wheel, so we settled in and enjoyed the view of Yokohama and the bay.

It was pretty cool! We could see all the rooftops, and most of them had something fun on them – pools, mini-golf courses, and helicopter landing pads to name a few. But seeing the whole town made me realized I hadn’t explored anything in Yokohama, so when we got back to solid ground, Stefan and decided to “miss” one of the repeat talks and check out some more of the town.

We wandered the waterfront, found a park by the bay, and napped in the shady grass. Refueled with Mickey D’s and refreshed by the nap, we walked around Chinatown which was apparently the largest in Japan! We took the long way back to the conference center and arrived for the last session.

Chinatown

We were all pretty psyched to hear the “closing remarks” and be freed! It was the last day of the program, but most people were still pretty dead from the previous night’s festivities, so we said our goodbyes and people headed off to do whatever they they chose for their last evening in Japan…me and five other people decided to grab dinner. Fernanda still wanted to try to find conveyor belt sushi, so we set our through Yokohama to find a place.

Each plate and its cost

It took us a few minutes of interrogating strangers on the street, but we found a spot! I had never been, to belt sushi before, but it always looked like so much fun! The sushi chef stand in the middle of the restaurant behind the bar/counter, and as they make the sushi, they load it on the belt and it goes around and around! If you want something specific, you yell it out and they make it for you, and the plates are all color coded by price, so you know how much each costs. It WAS fun to watch the little plates dance around on their conveyor belt, and it was more fun to sample whatever sushi I wanted!

It was a delicious meal, and so cheap! There was only one that I tried that I wasn’t in love with….the squid still had something hard inside of it, and after eating one of them, I couldn’t bring myself to eat the second piece even though it tasted ok.

Mmmm squid

Anyway, we all called it an early night after dinner. I packed and got ready for the next week – Stefan hadn’t stopped talking about how much he liked the city of Kamakura, and he was staying after the program for a few days and was headed there, so I decided to join him for a beach day before Kyoto!

Karaoke: International Idol!

Thursday was the start of the two-day Immunology conference/symposium the Institute was hosting. We were expected to attend every lecture, but none of us were sure how serious RCAI was going to be about that…we were less-than-surprised to discover a sign-in sheet waiting for us. I sat through the whole morning session, but it was pretty killer. Two of the speakers had actually given talks during our class, so we were practically sitting through the same talks for part of the day.

When the lunch break arrived, one of the guys was smart enough to go look at the sign in sheet: there was a column for Thursday and Friday….but not a separate  “morning” and “afternoon” column. This meant we could probably ditch a bit of the afternoon without getting caught! I grabbed lunch with some of the other students at a hilariously themed restaurant called “Garlic Jo’s.” Everything on the menu was slathered in tons of garlic, but we were a little pleased for the change in flavor, so we opted to try it out. I just thought all the posters of Gilroy, CA were funny!

Beer latte?

After the insanely garlicky pizza and pasta I split with one of the other girls, I headed back to the talks to try to recruit people for my plan to play hooky: I wanted to go to the Kirin brewery! I was sort of successful, and convinced three of the guys to skip and come with me! I felt a little delinquent sneaking out of “school” and going to drink beer, but two more of the afternoon speakers were repeats, and I just didn’t have it in me to sit through them.

So much foam!

We found the right train after a bit of confusion, and made it to the Kirin headquarters. Upon entering the huge facility, we were told there would be a free tour in 15 minutes, but it would be in Japanese. We hesitated until they told us there were 3 free tastings at the end :P


Only 3 Japanese people joined the tour, so the four of us just kind of followed behind making up our own narrations and staring at the inner workings of the Kirin factory. There were a few plaques and videos with English writing, and our tour guide tried as best as she could to tell us some of the highlights in broken English. Most interestingly, we learned they could bottle over 600 bottles per minute and fill 2000 cans per minute! And we got to see the whole place in action, with bottles and cans dancing down their conveyor belts on their way to being filled or packaged.

Traveling in packs

We made it to the end of the tour and had our first tasting, but we were surprised when they handed us what looked like a beer latte…the beer had a foamy top that quite closely resembled whipped cream. But we were anxious to try it anyway, and after an enthusiastic “kampai” we tried the beers. They were SO WEIRD! The foam on top was actually like a beer-foam-slushy! It was frozen and totally odd. You had to take a big enough sip so that you could actually get to the liquid beer underneath! We all agreed that maybe this trend could skip the US…

Next, we got a demo on how to pour the perfect beer, which apparently involves a LOT of foam. Seriously, it is the exact opposite of how we all learn to pour a beer. There is no glass tilting, and it seems like the goal is to have 50% foam, 50% liquid. Our guide even demonstrated that the perfect beer should be able to be tilted from side-to-side without spilling or losing its foam due to the “cap” of head on the beer.

Our Karaoke Kave

We drank our tastings, but were informed at the end of the second one that our time was up – I guess we were being timed! We were not aware that we only had 20 minutes to order and drink all three free tastings, so most of our third taste was confiscated and poured out! But we had fun and got to tour and taste for free, so after grabbing a sweet Kirin t-shirt, we headed back to the conference to pretend like nothing happened 0;)

We arrived in time for the reception, and were surprised to walk into a very, very nice room with an open bar and a French-themed buffet of food! The attendees were basically just the invited speakers and the 42 students, and it was pretty swanky! The food was delicious, and the desert was even better. I felt very spoiled, especially after skipping!

"You are, my fire...the one, desire"

At the end of the evening, the organizers handed out awards for the “Best Talk” – oddly enough there were 7 “best” talks, but alas, I didn’t make the cut, haha! It was a really nice event, and I even talked a little bit of science with two professors who work in San Diego!

When we were all leaving, we told one of the professors we wanted to go to karaoke…he immediately began having secretaries call around, and before we knew it, about 35 of us (including professors) were on our way to sing!

We were put into a huge private room, which had already been stocked full of pitchers of beer and shochu (shochu is kind of like sweet potato sake)! It was a little difficult to figure out how to pick songs (everything was in Japanese, and the professors were even a bit confused), but after a slow start, everyone was having a blast. We sang a bit of everything (Beatles to Backstreet Boys, Sweet Caroline to Hakuna Matata….) and it was mostly hilarious. I sang a duet of "I Want it That Way" which seemed more well-recieved than my talk the previous day....One of the students from Singapore even got up and did a Mozart song – opera singing during karaoke?!? He was amazing though! Even the professors sang a few!

Awesome Japanese moves

What we weren’t told when we arrived, is that as usual, there was a strict, Japanese time limit. When our 2 hours were up, the “party” was over according to the organizers - but nobody wanted it to end! ….What we also weren’t informed about was that the cost was 3000¥ per person!! Kind of a lot of money if you weren’t drinking or singing, and we had a lot of people that came just to be spectators! But I had a lot of fun, so I thought it was all totally worth it :)

After the Japanese limit of fun for the day had been reached, we all headed back to the hotel to avoid the midnight rush hour (like every night), but someone had heard that we found a cool temple near the hotel, and about 20 of us all bought beers on the way out of the train station and went to hang out in the fresh air.

Before the cops...

Well, it didn’t take long for us to get loud and silly, and we found a playground on one side of the temple. We were swinging and carrying on when I saw 3 motorbikes pull up – since the streets were totally deserted, I had a feeling we were about to get in trouble….sure enough, the three Japanese police officers hopped off their glorified scooters and started asking questions. We played dumb for a minute, but one of them was practically fluent in English, and he politely interrogated us before informing us that he got numerous complaints from the neighbors around the park, and that we had to go away.

At this point most people called it a night, but about 8 of us headed towards the river, and sat by the water away from the buildings where we couldn’t cause any trouble. It was about 2am, and slowly people faded and went back to the hotel. Determined to catch the sunrise, Stefan (my new German friend) and I stayed up until about 4:15. The sky got light, but it was too cloudy to see anything, so we were forced to give up and went home!