oh, and there is this poor, ancient elephant who has lived there forever in a pin about the size of my apartment.
hakone is a mountain region formed from volcanoes a super long time ago. these pics are from the ropeway we took.
i spy with my little eye, the right side of fuji-san through the clouds...can you see it?
i like to think this is from "jamie and derek" not "jamie derek"
these are scriptures written by monks. they say there are too many writings for anyone to read, so they put them in this think that you hold on to and walk around and you can get all the wisdom from them just the same as if you had read them. this was my second go round with it, so yeah, i should be getting pretty wise soon.
a small statue from this little temple built into the mountain. it is for this goddess of the arts and humanities. it is so awesome b/c there are little rooms in the cave that are filled with hundreds of these.
on my mom's first full day in japan, i took her to run all over western tokyo. it was rainy and poopy but she was awesome.
when we went to the tokyo metropolitan government buildings, we happened upon, well, we weren't sure what it was. mom wanted to go check it out. it was some kind of thing put on by the girl scouts of japan called tokyo family day. the dragged us over and put kimono on us, then we did a version of japanese tea ceremony. they also had kids doing taiko and girls doing traditional japanese dance. it was such a cool thing for us to happen upon. and i think they dug it too b/c they kept taking pictures of us and news cameras followed us around as well. if only we had been able to get back in time to watch the evening news.
then we went to harajuku. since it was sunday and harajuku is known for being crazy on sundays i thought it would be perfect. it ended up just being annoying b/c everyone was trying to fit down the tiny streets with their umbrellas and everyone just kept bumping into each other and my umbrella ended up about 2 feet above my head. gah, i love harajuku.
we went to meiji shrine and these university students interviewed us for their class. they were nice and it was really fun. they even translated my name into kanji for me. turns out it's pretty good. it means "right ethics" so i was cool with that. a lot better than some of the other kanji translations people end up with.
shibuya + umbrellas = awesome
a random statue of jesus that we found near chinatown...
gyoza...my favorite food in japan...are everywhere here. thank you chinese immigrants for bringing these little yummies here a long time ago.
the chinese styled temple in chinatown.
from the 27th or so floor of the sky building.
