Author: Kendal

The cute town of Narita, Japan

Our last couple days in Japan we decided to stay closer to the airport; we found a really cute city to stay in called Narita. The hotel we stayed in was about a 20 minute walk to the main temple, the Naritasan Shinshoji Buddhist Temple, so we decided to check it out. On the walk there we passed little cute shops and restaurants that were fun to go and browse around. Once we reached the temple we realized that it was GINORMOUS!!!! The artwork on everything was beautiful, they even had a cute fountain where there were at least 30 turtles lounging around.  As we walked further into the temple grounds we saw that they were having a service in the temple, so dad being dad took his shoes off and went in to check it out.  Behind the temple there was a huge garden/park and those cherry blossoms we had been searching for, well we finally found a few in bloom.  I guess even though this is the season we were still a couple weeks early because the weather was still cool. When we headed back we got another look at the cute shops and restaurants and saw that one of the restaurants had some men who were filleting a ton of eels right in the front of the restaurant. Then they would grill them up on skewers.

My parents kept telling me to try the grilled eel when we had sushi so I finally did on our last night and I loved it – the sauce is amazing!

In the Naritasan Shinshoji Temple the monks walking out.

There were huge fish in this pond, located in the Naritasan Park behind the temple, that would swim by you hoping you would feed them

On our last night in Japan we went to a local sushi restaurant, ate at the bar and had tons of sushi. The people working at that bar were super friendly and it was fun to watch them make the sushi.  Instead of the usual sushi I eat that is wrapped in rice called maki, I got nigiri, which is a little thing of rice on the bottom and a huge piece of fish on top.  The amount of fish they give you is easily twice the amount that you get in the USA. It was a great way to end our visit in Japan.  If you didn’t know, the next place we will be going is to the land “down under”…aka AUSTRALIA!!!!!

Our last night in Japan was awesome with great sushi but also very sad because we all loved Japan!