I went to Tokyo with the intention of staying in the city for a few days, to really get a good idea of the city and what it had to offer.  However, in grade 6 my friend Mark did a 1 month exchange program where a student from Japan would come and live with him and go to school for a month then he would go to Japan and do the same thing.  Naoki came to school with us in the sixth grade and because Mark was a pretty good friend, we ended up doing a lot of things outside of school as well.  Naoki lives in Yokohama now and so through the powers of the internet, I reached out and arranged to meet up!

I had a pretty crazy night but was not scheduled to meet up with Naoki until he finished work, so I had a bit of time to nap and then get on a train towards Yokohama which was less than an hour long.  I got off the train and met him in a cool tourist type area outside of Yokohama itself called Kamakura where there was a big buddha, a palace and a shrine.  We started off by wandering the streets and heading towards the shrine Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū which was pretty neat, but honestly the same as most of the other Shrines i have seen in Japan.

There was a wedding ceremony happening at the shrine which was interesting to watch.  Very traditional.

We then jumped on a train and headed towards the big Buddha!

The Buddha was indeed pretty big and the coolest part is that you could go inside which was  anew experience for me.  You could get a much better idea of how it was constructed which was also pretty neat.

We headed back into Kanazawa city and into China Town where my Hostel was located.  We found somewhere to eat and grabbed a few beers.  It was really awesome catching up and hearing some local stories about Japan and some of his travels.  Naoki ended up doing a lot of his schooling in Canada but returned to Japan for work.

After some food and beers, it was time for him to head home and so with that I said goodbye and headed to bed myself.

The next morning I woke up and laced up my shoes for a nice run along the water of Kanazawa.

After my run, I returned to the hostel, showered up and then headed back to the train station in order to catch my train back to Tokyo.  I guess this was a short post, but I didn’t take many photos when I was hanging out with Naoki and most of the interesting parts of the day were just catching up with him so there wasn’t too much to write.