Day Trip to Kawagoe!

It's been a while, and I'm very sorry about that. Rest assured that this break has been spent paying attention to homework and doing exciting things like going to the grocery store. Truly, I am living the life.

I have a friend from home, Chris, who went on exchange to Tokyo in 2009, and he's been recommending places for day trips to me from time to time. I finally decided to take some of his advice and so on Saturday my friend Jack and I went to Kawagoe for the day!

Kawagoe is roughly an hour and a half from our dorm, out in Saitama Prefecture. It's also called 小江戸 (Little Edo), thanks to its well-preserved district of Edo Period warehouses and buildings. There's also an alley filled with old-fashioned sweet shops!

What an adorable friendship!

"Welcome to Little Edo, Kawagoe"

An old-style home

These wildflowers were growing in an empty lot! There were more varieties but I was too short to see over these flowers. D:

We walked all over the city, rather than take a bus, so we relied a lot on these tourism signs and the tourist map we picked up in the train station.

Our first stop in Kawagoe was Kita-in, a temple famous for its main hall, which was a part of the original Edo Castle.

泥棒橋 (Thief's Bridge), one of the side entrances to Kita-in

 

Me in front of the main hall, formerly a building of the original Edo Castle.

 

People could come pray for safety in traffic at this small shrine.

The entrance to the remaining building of Edo Castle. There was a portion sectioned off from the temple that you could tour and learn about the castle.

A VERY old cemetery.

There were small food stands at the temple. Jack got sweet potato sticks, as Kawagoe is famous for sweet potatoes.

I stole one or two. :)

After Kita-in, we headed toward the Warehouse District, where the majority of the remaining Edo Period buildings are. There is a street with small shops filled with a lot of what you'd probably consider touristy goods, but they were definitely products of good quality and I even got myself a nice bento box that can be microwaved AND put in the dishwasher. We're getting really fancy up here!

These buildings are from the Showa Period, so considerably newer than the Edo Period buildings, but equally interesting!

Back to Edo-style architecture!

It's pretty common to find rickshaw businesses in tourist areas in Japan -- there were many in Kyoto and Nara, and the guys who run them are pretty interesting characters.

The bell tower!

So Kawagoe is famous for sweet potatoes, and Japan LOVES its soft-serve ice cream, so what better than purple sweet potato ice cream? Jack and I stopped by one of the local ice cream shops to try some out!

It was surprisingly good!

 

Okay so apparently Yong Hwa from CN Blue and Seohyun from Girls' Generation ordered ice cream here and the the ladies who run the place were so excited about that they posted this note outside of their shop, so that's nice.

After our brief ice cream break, we headed towards 菓子屋横丁, or Candy Alley, to pick up some sweets. 菓子屋横丁 used to be a neighborhood filled with confectioneries, but it's now down to a small alley of about 20 shops. In 1923 菓子屋横丁 supplied candy for the entire nation after the Great Kanto Earthquake -- pretty impressive for a single city!

This shop had misters built into the roof. Pretty clever!

Cheese-filled taiyaki!

Delicious!

We weren't allowed to take photos of the candy in the store, so I took some photos of the candy I bought once I got home. It's absolutely beautiful!

Small candies with flowers.

Large candies with flowers.

These are hilarious. It's Hello Kitty, Hamtaro, Anpanman, Pikachu, and Keroppi.

Overall, it was a fantastic, if not completely exhausting, day. I hope to be taking more day trips while I'm here (only 57 days left, unbelievably enough), though I'm very much looking forward to taking it easy next weekend!