Golden Week/Asakusa.

Last week there were a group of bank holidays that are all very close together. It is known as 'Golden Week'. Some businesses close on the days in between the bank holidays so people get a full week off. We still had lessons on Monday and Tuesday, but then had the 'rest' of the week off. 

On Friday I went to Asakusa with Nozomi. I've been to Asakusa before; it's in Northern Tokyo so one of the closer cities and convenient to get to. It's famous for Kaminarimon, a large entrance gate and Sensou-ji, the Buddhist temple which Kaminarimon leads to. 

For lunch we had okonomiyaki and monjayaki, the Kanto region equivalent. Okonomiyaki is a type of savoury pancake that can have pretty much any ingredients. The particular place we went to was cook-it-yourself, so you sit either side of a hot plate, they just give you the raw ingredients in a bowl and you fry it and flip it yourself. Monjayaki is more liquidy, and you scrape bits off the hot plate and eat them rather than chopping it up into bits. 

After that we headed to Sensou-ji. Being Golden Week, it was packed with a mix of Japanese people and tourists. It was also heavily raining, so just walking up to the temple was a bit of an umbrella-dodging nightmare. The temple is very impressive and definitely worth it, however. We got fortunes for 100 yen and went inside the temple, where people throw money into a grate and pray. As it was so busy, people were throwing money from several metres back; all the money flying through the air was an interesting experience ^_^ 

We went and had a look in some of the kimono shops, got a bit frightened by the prices, and bought some of the local sweet treats, ningyouyaki. They are pastry/caky casings filled with red bean paste, which is a common ingredient in sweets here. It is sort of a savoury sweetness, and very tasty.

After that we went over towards the bank of the river and looked at the Tokyo Sky Tree. It's a new building due to open later this month which is now the second tallest in the world. It's about twice as tall as Tokyo Tower. 

So I had a good Golden Week, even if most of it was spent studying. The weather on the Saturday was also wonderful, which put me in a very good mood ^_^

(Photo is from the first time we went to Asakusa, so there were a lot less people. Still raining, though :p)