Japan – And finally, Hello Narita…

And here we are, the final stop and most of the way through it. The work I’ve been given to do is all but completed with a few minor tasks left to complete (one of which requires me to go shopping in Akihabara in Tokyo tomorrow). From the looks of things it may be possible I’m going home on Tuesday or Wednesday, but who knows, work has a habit of throwing curve balls at me at the last possible moment.

Work news aside Narita decided it would be a good weekend to continuously rain and be miserably cold. Ignoring this obvious stay inside and rest weather my colleague and I headed out into the town to find some lunch and visit the Naritasan Shinshō-ji Temple, one of the oldest and most visited temples in Japan (i’m sure this is helped by traffic from the airport though…). To get to it though is the most fun as you slither through closed off streets (on the weekend) lined by shops selling all types of souvenirs and the speciality of the region, eel. The smell and the smoke coming off the shops is truly extraordinary and quite hard to put into words. The street itself (Omote-sandō for those wondering if it had a name) was quite packed considering the weather, on the 1st of January or on a bright summers day it would be pretty hard to move without getting dragged along by a crowd.

The temple itself is huge consisting of one giant temple in the middle and a lot of grounds around it filled with various temples, shrines and monuments. It even includes a giant walking track through a forest at the base of the biggest pagoda (due to the weather we decided against exploring it). If you ever get a few hours lay over in Narita its worth the quick 15min trip on either the Keisei or JR line to Narita to head down and explore the grounds it really is impressive.

Anyway here are the photos as per usual, not much due to the weather. They are also pretty badly modified due to in course the weather playing havoc on my camera’s sensor, my own laziness and my computer hard disk dying making it quite hard to work on the photos. Maybe its time to invest in a SSD for this laptop…

Either way will update with news regarding travelling home when I have some more details locked in (hopefully Monday) as from the looks of it if there is no more work to do I’ll be done with everything Monday afternoon which would make for a very boring week sitting out at the airport.