Day 5 – Lost in Time
How ironic, I went to sleep with the impression that we’d adapted our biorythm. But we both woke up very LATE, with a headache and I had had a bad dream on top of it. Our plan was to go to Asakusa, so we did, but we first had a LATE breakfast.
We where going to the station and came upon the luminous idear to go by the one hundred yen shop. Because a visit to Japan is not complete without a visit to the one hundred yen shop and there is one very close by, at the station square right across the main street from where we are staying in the ryokan. So we lost some time here too.
When we bought our ticket we couldn’t enter the metro with it, so we went back to the ticket office. There we waited in a suddenly sprouted meandering line in front of the desk for ten minutes, before we realised that it was not the ticket that was the problem but we had tried to enter the wrong metro.
In Asakusa itself, we first had a snack,… My advice for you: NEVER go to eat in a Kentucky Fried Chiken (KFC), for you’ll get a measy little portion with the cheapest quality of ingredients for way too many yens! I was disapointed a little that I had made a bad judgement. Tamou, Tamou, you know the advertisement pictures are bollocks! I’m beginning to feel like Obelix who thinks with his stomach instead of his head, hahaha!
The temple complex itself is not hard to find, but we didn’t find it instantly, it takes some time before you can orientate yourself. Best is to do this before you walk down a street. When we arived at the Temple, there’s a whole alley towards the entrance that is literally paved with shops. All very close next to eachother. These shops are stuffed to the sealing with prullaria and paraphernalia of every kind. It seemed to me they had not thousands but millions of items all arranged in a way that you can see them. T-shirts, kimono’s, fake and qitch stuff like medals and statues, little keychains and sweets to name just a few.
Don’t get tempted too much. Because you’ll linger the whole hundred yards and be LATE for the temple, like us. Most temples close at four, that’s something we learned the hard way. The only thing still open were the drawers on the both sides of the entrance compound. You should take a waiver out of one of these drawers (after you deposited 100 yen in a box) and it’ll tell you wheter you have bad luck or good luck. If you have bad luck, you must fold the waiver and bind it to a rack next to the drawers, so that your bad luck can get blown away by the wind. We asked someone to transLATE our waivers and apparently we had the BEST OF LUCK you can draw from these boxes.
After some lingering and taking pictures of the surrounding statues we headed back for the busy streets. Determined on finding empty Kakejiku (for which we are searching for a few days now) we went into the information office. The two ladies there put soo much effort into it that they came up with not only one, but three different adresses where we could buy them. Time eliminated our choises as only the shopping center was still open. We got to the seventh floor but after asking it turned out that they didn’t sell any, we bought some paper instead.
Hunger was setting in so we decided on having a quick go in between in a conveyor belt sushi shop. Japanese style fast food. We took the next train and were running LATE, first we thought ten minutes, but it turned out to be a half an hour. We didn’t want to make a bad impression by being LATE for a training with Soke, so we regretfully and shamefully decided to turn around when we were suppose to transfer in Kashiwa.
We felt the full weight of gravity when we were fully realising that we had been running LATE the whole day. What an irony, even with the best of luck we could only blame ourselves for this lost day.
