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Hi. I'm supposed to be packing for my trip to Obama City tomorrow morning, and/or sleeping, so I'm gonna try to keep this short and just put up some photos. Basically, today I went to Nishi Arai Daishi with my friend Kohei -- it was his idea since he'd never been there. It's up in Adachi-ku, a 25-minute bus ride from Akabane, or a convoluted train ride, so we took the bus.
Hatsumode is this tradition where the entire country descends upon temples for the first prayer of the year, within the first 2-3 days of the year, so as a result, some temples are ridiculously crowded. This one was only a 10-15 minute wait to get in -- I remember trying to go to Tsuruoka Hachimangu a few years back with Carl, which had about 4 bazillion people there. The other cool thing is that they set up tons of little stands with food and stuff, so you go and pray, and then after that you maybe buy omamori (protective charms) and omikuji (fortunes), and then you go eat various stuff being sold by the vendors in the tents!
We ate "Nishi-arai-yaki", which was basically okonomiyaki with a big slice of meat on the top of it and some corn inside it in addition to the normal cabbage, it was pretty good. Kohei also drank sweet sake, and had karaage, and I bought some satsuma-imo sticks. Yum. Then we walked for a mile or so until we found Nishi-Arai train station, which is in a nice renovated suburbany area with tons of high-rise apartments and a new Ario mall and everything.
Went to Ueno, wandered Ameyokocho, eventually ended up at a kushikatsu place and ate fried stuff on sticks, drank some beer, talked for a while, then went home. Whee.
This is the temple we went to:
( More under the cut )
Hatsumode is this tradition where the entire country descends upon temples for the first prayer of the year, within the first 2-3 days of the year, so as a result, some temples are ridiculously crowded. This one was only a 10-15 minute wait to get in -- I remember trying to go to Tsuruoka Hachimangu a few years back with Carl, which had about 4 bazillion people there. The other cool thing is that they set up tons of little stands with food and stuff, so you go and pray, and then after that you maybe buy omamori (protective charms) and omikuji (fortunes), and then you go eat various stuff being sold by the vendors in the tents!
We ate "Nishi-arai-yaki", which was basically okonomiyaki with a big slice of meat on the top of it and some corn inside it in addition to the normal cabbage, it was pretty good. Kohei also drank sweet sake, and had karaage, and I bought some satsuma-imo sticks. Yum. Then we walked for a mile or so until we found Nishi-Arai train station, which is in a nice renovated suburbany area with tons of high-rise apartments and a new Ario mall and everything.
Went to Ueno, wandered Ameyokocho, eventually ended up at a kushikatsu place and ate fried stuff on sticks, drank some beer, talked for a while, then went home. Whee.
This is the temple we went to:
( More under the cut )
