Japan 5

Okay, so really, I don't even really know where we are! We have done so much stuff in such a small amount of time, you miss one day and you can't keep up!

But i'll try to get you all up to speed. So, Tuesday, was our "free"day. Ha! "Free Day!"

We met with a missionary for coffee early in the morning. It was supposed to be an hour meeting but ended up talking to him for two hours. Cool guy, good guy, doing a lot of good work here. Yeah.

After that we headed back to the hotel to decided what to do with the rest of the day. We had a prayer meeting at 7:30 and it was about noon. What to do, what to do. 

Well, at the rate that we had been going, we should have done something chill... but there is no rest for the weary!

We decided to take a road trip. Nathaniel suggested that we go to a small town about an hour south of Tokyo and Matt and I jumped on the idea. 

We grabbed some lunch at a super local place....

dropped MaryAnn off a the hotel because she was smart and took advantage of the rest, and headed off in to the maze that is the Tokyo public transportation system. Let's take a step back. You may be thinking, city... ya know, public transportation, whatever. Not so hard. L.A. has 7 million people. Tokyo has 35 million people, and they are all going somewhere.

We took a picture of our hotel's phone number in case we got lost...

and set off! Streets of Ginza anyone?

Step one done, made it to the suburb train station. Actually, we were running through the station because we were trying to make the earliest train possible to maximize our Kamakura time.

We got there seconds after the train left.... so we waited.

Matt and I had a seat next to one another... Nathaniel made some new friends.

Welcome to Kamakura!

Hmm.... figure this one out.

Kamakura is a really cute shopping town on the water. There are a bunch of temples and shrines to visit here too. It would have been so fun to spend some more time here, but we didn't have it, so we saw the abbreviated version of the town.

Not sure at all what this is a picture of...

This was so good! Ice cream (obviously) but the flavor choices were green tea, green tea sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato vanilla, or vanilla. Sounds totally gross and I was ready for them to be nasty...

They were delicious!!! Nathaniel had green tea sweet potato, I had sweet potato vanilla, and Matt had vanilla.

This is for biscuit!

Odd pictures of the town.

We made it to a shrine! First shrine for me.

No idea what this is.... beer?

Matt went camera crazy!

This dude was creepy!

The weather was absolutely stunning!

Massive fish!

I wanted a ride from this dude, but we were in a hurry to get back!

Gyu Kaku in Japan!

Nathaniel wanted to pick some stuff up at a grocery store. We went to one and they were out of what he wanted. Then, using our stellar Japanese, we asked where another one was. We got a general direction and head out. I found a store that looked like Monoprix from the outside and we went in! It was a grocery store!

Our train was minutes from leaving! We hadn't eaten dinner yet and we had to be back for our prayer meeting by 7:30! We hopped on the train, almost missed our stop, ran and scooped up Mary Ann (who I just learned has a space in her name) and headed to the Pfeils for a prayer meeting. Dinner was out.

Sarah Pfeil had pie, which we scarfed down! Well, Matt did, the rest of us ate like normal people. Our thought was to get dinner afterwards. However, the meeting lasted till eleven.

Long but really fun day!