Enoshima again!

[dr4b]

Carl and I went down to Enoshima today.

I got to take the monorail again! Hooray!

We got stuck in the touristy little street between the stations and the island bridge -- first at an old-fashioned pachinko place with the huge marble pinballs (I've still never played NORMAL pachinko) where it was 200 yen to play and the lady kept giving us more balls for some reason anyway. Then Carl saw a place with pink taiyaki so we had to get that. It had strawberry jam inside and came with ice cream. There were a lot of people in there who were obviously coming to the beach.

Onwards to the island, where we did the normal thing of climbing the escalators to go up through the temples, and we went into the garden and the lighthouse observatory. Unlike my past visits, this time we actually walked around the entire garden, seeing the Miami Beach sister city cafe thing, and the ruins of Samuel Cocking's original greenhouse, things like that. Carl got stopped to fill out a tourism survey on the way up, which was amusing.

Then, for yet another change... we actually went to the entire other half of the island, which I had simply never been to before. (I've been to Enoshima maybe 4-5 times because I really like it.) There's basically another mountain that makes up a third of the island... the sucky part being, you have to walk down a ton of stairs to get to the end of that part of the island, which has yet another temple, and eventually ends in a rocky beach where people were fishing for shellfish. It's really gorgeous down there, BUT then you have to climb the entire damn thing again, all of those stairs. THAT part sucked. Apparently sometimes there is a boat that will take you back to the mainland from that end of the island, but it didn't run today. So we climbed a lot.

We had a lot of snack foods on the way, anyway -- eel yaki-nigiri on the mainland, satsuma-imo croquettes at the inlet, sauce dango on the way up the path, ice cream at the top, stuff like that. I bought a "mystery soda" and it turned out to be Aquarius.

By the end of the day I was really zonked. We walked back to the monorail, got on it, and I fell asleep for the 13-minute ride. At Ofuna we got on the Shonan-Shinjuku line and I pretty much slept the entire way back then too. I have a pretty terrible headache that hasn't gone away -- it worries me that I seem to get these "sun headaches", basically, even with sunscreen and drinking water and all.

We met up with Oren in Akabane, and since nobody had a distinct preference for food, I suggested we go to Watami, which is an izakaya, or an ishokuya, I don't know what you call it. It's the place you go to to drink, but that has a bazillion little dishes of all different sorts, so if you're me, you go with friends who drink, and you just share lots of food. Oren and Carl both had sake and umeshu and stuff, and I had Coke, and water. We shared gyoza, pizza, spring rolls, karaage, zucchini cheese sticks, eggplant-bacon spaghetti, kani-cream croquette, renkon chips (mostly Carl), tsukune, and a sushi roll. It worked out really well, we all got to basically have some kind of food that we wanted, we got to try some new things, and eventually we even got a table (we started out at the bar).

Then I dragged everyone to karaoke for an hour. It was fun, but an hour is really short. And karaoke is super-expensive on Saturday nights, yikes.

Home. Headachy still! This sucks. I hope I can fall asleep soon.



Weird old pachinko game thingy.


On the bridge to the island.


Miami is a sister city to Enoshima, apparently...


I'm at the top of the world and looking down on creation...


The lighthouse.


Here we are at the end of the island. (I'm not THAT much taller than Carl, I'm just standing on a higher rock than he is.)