三田祭 Vacation: Kamakura （鎌倉), Shimokitazawa (下北沢）, and more of Tokyo...

I just uploaded additional random photos from my past couple of weekends on facebook, and realized that I've hit photo 100 in my "Hanging out in Tokyo" album. Sitting here in my tiny little room not even 200 square feet, and after keeping myself way too busy for the past couple of weeks (not sure how!), I've finally had time to organize my photos from these trips and the meetups, and reflect! (How deep. Very Janice like :P)

So, two weeks ago it was Mita-sai. So in a nutshell, every university has a little festival celebrating itself every year. So Meiji university has "Meiji fest", and Waseda university has "Waseda fest." I'm not sure whether it's a Keio-specific thing, but Keio has multiple campuses (so Mita, Hyoshi, and a few others), and they seem to organize these festivals by campus. So, hence the concept of "Mita-sai" or Mita festival. But if you were to ask me what they do at these festivals, my answer would be "eat, hit on girls, and chill." Seriously - I was told by many fellow Keio students to avoid the festival at all because it's just a zoo in there. But I caught glimpses of it when I went for a free concert at Mita campus, and thought that it's basically a smaller version of Richmond night market (with just the food part, and none of the selling of the cheap "made in China" useless gadgets and / or Hello Kitty toys). :)

Anyway, so thanks to Mita-sai, I got a whole week of vacation two weeks ago and took the opportunity to do a little bit of travelling and exploring. So the first day of Mita-sai vacation, I went with my dorm mate to Kamakura. Again, incorporating a little bit of wiki-intelligence in my not so sophisticated blog, Kamakura used to be the capital of Japan during the Kamakura shogunate, from 1185-1333. So, it's definitely a city with a lot of history to it.

As a Christian, it's actually really hard to get overly-hyped up about visiting temples, but unfortunately, that's what you basically see all over Japan. Anyhow, we went and visited an (apparently) famous temple (I forget the name), had an amazing ramen for lunch (the soup was yuzu-based. yuzu is basically an asian grapefruit...), and stubbornly went to the beach despite the fact that it was pouring and super windy that day.

Kamakura's right along the edge of Japan so we really wanted to enjoy afternoon tea right by the ocean...and despite the fact that our umbrellas were literally breaking apart from the wind and rain, we insisted on visiting the coffee shop that we picked out from the touristy book. That's quite some persistence right there! I really thought I was going to catch on to a second cold that afternoon - but thankfully I didn't!

In Kamakura-area, there's a little island called "Enoshima", and it's quite a romantic spot cause you can walk over to the island via a little bridge while looking off into the ocean with the sun setting in the background. Ah romantic indeed. But there was no romance for me. Oh well, next time maybe!

It was beautiful. The sunset was amazingly stunning.

Even though there was no romance for me that day, my dormmate and I picked up a bottle of red wine on our way home, and she made a delicious beef stew for the both of us. It was a good day nevertheless. For interested travellers, Kamakura is about 30 minutes away from Yokohama station, and I highly recommend for those that like history, culture, and natural scenery!

Couple days after our Kamakura-trip, we went to Shimokitazawa. I know - the names are such a mouth-full! Shimokitazawa is a little town four stops away from Shibuya in Tokyo. It's a very neighborhoody part of town, with lots of little boutique-y stores targetting the younger crowd. I like it a lot as a shopping spot, as I find some of the more famous stations, Shibuya, and Shinjuku are either a) too pricey therefore I can't afford anything or b) the fashion's too CRAZY-O. So as much as I think Tokyo has way too many shopping destinations, I haven't found a good place that I like walking around for my own personal pleasure until I visited Shimokitazawa for the first time.

But more importantly, I literally felt like I had so much food that day, it terrifies me to recollect what I had.

Quick run down of the food list that day:

1) taiyaki : Japanese pastry that's shaped as a fish with, depending on what you want, custard, red bean, etc in it

2) niku nigiri : so a piece of meat wrapped around grilled rice ball (okay i'm not making the food sound very appetizing) -->

3) gyoza : <--

4) at izayaka: i think at least 20 skewers (between the two of us), and beer. it was this super duper ghetto place at the corner of the street, with an open store front packed with smoking middle-age salary men and foreigners with Japanese friends...emphasizing the latter part. So we were brave to even have tried walking in there -->

5) chestnut waffle : so yummmmmmmmm <--

Don't judge me now!!! A girl's still got to eat, and I hardly ate that day during the day (deliberately). :P

And apart from these two little trips, I have had many guests visit me from New York this past two weeks. Pretending to be the "Tokyo-insider" that I am not to my New Yorker friends has not been easy. But thanks to them I finally have seen parts of Harajuku and Omotesando that I haven't seen, experienced the craziest izakaya experience ever, and checked out where they filmed "Lost in Translation" at the Park Hyatt. :)

I realize that my blog entry is getting a tad too long - but just have to share one last thing!!! So I was walking around with my New York friends two weeks ago, and they found this izakaya place in Roppongi called "Inakaya-ya". When we walked in, we saw these two men in the traditional Japanese uniform, sitting behind a grill with all the various vegetables, meats, and seafood laid out right in front of you. To order, you had to talk to them and say "I want three skewers of beef, two plates of shitake, etc." What's even MORE cool, is that after they've grilled it, they'll hand it to you via this super-duper big and long "pedal-like" scoop with the finished products on it as we were all seated around these two guys. It was definitely one of the coolest experiences I have had so far in Japan, but of course, spectacles such as these do not come at a small price!