Kamakura and Asakusa

This weekend the “rainy season” was not so bad, yet. On Saturday we met a Japanese colleague from JAXA who had previously spent a year in Cologne. It was very nice to see him again and get some further insight into the Japanese culture. We exploited the nice weather and went to see the Buddhist temples of the Asakusa quarter. This seemed to be very touristy to us. People are loud, take lots of pictures etc.


In the evening we went to a coin laundry (Ko-I-N-Ra-N-Do-Ri in Japanese). It was good to finally having found one. It was also interesting to watch the people, like one guy from a restaurant who came with some kind of trolley full of the small napkins used here. He carried a bag filled with different kinds of detergents, started the laundry, sat down for a moment to read in a newspaper and off he went back to the restaurant.

On Sunday we took the train to Kamakura. Kamakura is now a suburb of Tokyo. It was once for slightly more than one and a half century the capital of Japan. There are some Buddhist shrines and a great Buddha to visit.



One shrine was particularly interesting. People go there for money laundry. Literally. You put your money in a small basket and wash it in the spring water. That is supposed to give you good fortune and wealth. In Kamakura we also briefly went to the beach but since the weather was starting to get worse we quickly returned.