Japan Day 6- Kamakura and Enoshima Island!

Thursday we spent all day with all the Rasmussens. Nash and Kylee had the day off of school! This was one of my favorite days!!  It just felt so carefree and FUN!!  We met the Rasmussens at our subway/train station (which is right by our hotel) and headed out toward the beach another direction to Kamakura where there is a HUGE statue of Buddha! You can even go inside of him! After that we had lunch at a yummy Hawaiian burger joint called Kua Aina and these hamburgers were seriously the best ones I’ve ever had!! I got mine with avocado! We also got boba drinks with it and fries of course! They were strawberry boba drinks and even creamier than the ones we had the other night! Love!  We walked over a long bridge to Enoshima Island. This whole area will be the site of all the sailing a ocean sports for the Summer Olympics this year!  We walked up to the top of the mountain on these meandering steps through shops, restaurants and very well manicured flower gardens and then down the rest of the stairs to the other side where we went down onto some really cool tide pools. We walked around those for a while. We found out the boats to the other side weren’t working so we had to hike all the way back up and then down through the mountain again to get back to the bridge to walk back to Kamakura. It was fun though and we definitely got our exercise and stairs in for the day!! We got ice cream in some interesting flavors before we headed back across the bridge.  (I just had the chocolate...been missing chocolate flavor in Japan!)  We caught our trains back to Tokyo and said good bye to the Rasmussens as we leave for Kyoto tomorrow. It’s been so fun doing things with them! Nash and Kylee are lots of fun too! They are good kids!! It was kind of sad saying goodbye! 

That night was the Theme dinner/Culture night and we went to a traditional Japanese restaurant where you remove your shoes and eat on tatami mats on the floor... although they had set up chairs and tables for our huge group.  (Thank you!)  On the way we passed the Tokyo Tower which is close to the Rasmussens.) It was an 8 course meal with a lot of very different foods... a lot I didn’t know what it was... most of it was good though! They use a lot of fish stock as a lot of the foods and veggies were flavored that way.  They had karaoke afterward. Fun but not something I wanted to do in front of a bunch of strangers! Fun to watch other people do it and some were pretty good!! We left on the first bus back to the hotel but it was pretty well finished when we left. We packed up our stuff and went to bed.