Takasaki x3

 


As I write this post, Japan is far behind me. But I cannot ignore the wonderful last 2 weeks I spent there last April. Here is an account of how I spent two amazing weeks in the care of my Japanese friend Ayumi and her family.

First off, we met in Tokyo and took off, early morning for Takasaki. My Japanese friend had never been there but she had heard all about our previous adventure in the town of Daruma!

We easily reached the town, and grabbed some Daruma bentos at the train station. We had planned on having an outdoor lunch  at the Daruma temple. We were a little bit behind schedule and miss the before noon bus. We ended up having to wait a good hour before the next mean of transportation to the temple, which was on a local train. By the time we reached the temple, we had very little time left so we zoomed up the hundreds of stairs and made our way to the main building. We snapped tons of pictures and bought Daruma-shape omikuji (300yen). My fortune was not exactly stellar so I decided to fold it up and tie it at the temple.

We then walked across the bridge to the Daruma factory. I was glad for once to have a Japanese translator to talk to the old man who had been so nice for us!! In fact he was so happy to see that we had brought our Japanese friend! As always Ayuchan did an amazing job at translating everything I wanted to say!!! 

The old man invited us to the second floor of the workshop and served us lunch! We had delicious Soba and tempura. We were not expecting such generosity. But we were really happy, since it hadn't had lunch yet! We still had our bentos with us but decided to keep them for dinner.

After the lunch, we headed back to the station and started the long journey back to Tokyo, then Narita then Sosa. I was finally going to meet her family!