Old books

I love the smell of books. I sometimes go to bookstores just to browse the titles of the books, and pick up a book in random and smell its pages. I love the smell of old ones, too, although they can smell like dust or some other. Old books with their frayed and dog-eared pages feel like old friends. They hold secrets, they have evoked laughter or sadness or even boredom at one time or another.

New books are quite expensive, and I haven't really warmed up to the idea of buying and reading ebooks, which can be cheaper. I was looking for a second-hand bookstore in my area so I just googled "second-hand bookstore Kansai" and I found Wantage Books Kobe. It sits just across Shin-Kobe Station. I had to rely on the map provided here. They are open only on Saturdays and Sundays, so I set off one Saturday to look for the shop. And what I found was love! You can buy books for as low as ¥100.

I am surely going back there again one of these days.

A trip down memory lane: Kamakura, Kanagawa

I went to Tokyo in the second week of June and instead of soaking up the sights and sounds of fast-paced Tokyo, my friends decided to bring me to Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour away from Central Tokyo. Kamakura is an old political center of Japan, similar to Kyoto and Nara.

Our first stop was Meigetsu-in, a Rinzai Zen temple known for its pretty hydrangeas, which bloom around June. It is also known as the Temple of Hydrangeas.

Our friend Shingo made reservations for a two-hour Kaiseki-ryōri lunch in a restaurant in Kamakura. The ambiance in the restaurant was very Zen. We were seated in a room with a view of a nice garden. Lunch was very elegant.

After lunch, we went to see the Great Buddha of Kamakura, which has an interesting history. The ticket says that the Buddha statue was cast in 1252 and originally housed inside a large temple hall. However, the temple buildings were destroyed several times by typhoons and a tidal wave in the 14th and 15th centuries. So, since 1495, the Buddha has been standing in the open air.

Shingo lived in Kamakura as a child and we went to his pre-school which was beside a pond. He was trying to push down the turtle in the pond, and he said that he used to do that when he was studying there.