Oh, it started so good today, finding three caches in a row – but then our good luck was depleted. Well, either that or all caches that are close to a temple or shrine just don’t work for us. Maybe it has to do with this one particular cache owner, who placed most of them. Anyway, we did only find one more and that was it.

On the way we saw a few temples, shrines (even on the top of the train station) and some Kazariyama. There is a Shinto tradition, where they are parading portable shrines (called mikoshi) through the neighborhood of the temple. Something you might have seen on TV or in a magazine. The masterful decorated Kazariyama are kind of like that – just that they are not shrines, thus not carrying spirits, about 8 meters high, weigh a ton and were used for racing. I would’ve liked to see that.

Of course, the caches led us to food as well (gotta love geocaching for that). We had some sweet red bean soup (zenzai) with ricecakes (genmai mochi) – so delicious. We also found the place for tomorrows dinner. (As you can see on the picture, the sun was so bright, that half of the soup evaporated before I could take the photo… true story!) If it weren’t for all the walking around, we’d return fat from Japan.

And just for the sake of completeness. Today was supposed to be a holiday: The Health and Sports Day (Taiiku no Hi). We didn’t notice anything about that. Most shops were open, no events were noticeable and some Japanese strangers we talked to didn’t know what we were talking about – except that it’s holiday and they get a day off.