Konpira

We went to the Konpira shrine on Monday and were amazed. First while we were driving around looking for a parking space we found this massive tree. Many of the trees in Japan have these big braces to help hold up the huge branches. They had even made special places in the concrete to allow the roots to grow. Funny thing is that this massive tree was in a bus parking lot.
The walk up to the shrine is lined with little shops full of all kinds of cool things, some of them very japanese like this pilgrim hat on Colette, or the gold plaited turd keychains, while some of the things were not very japanese at all.
We saw lots of really cool japanese swords, the man in the picture was working on a sword so intently that he didn't even look up when we took the picture, which was amazing because we have never been so gawked at like we were at the shrine. It was kind of surprising since we thought that they must get a lot of tourists, but I don't mind, and neither does Colette usually.
This was a strange temple or something that we saw in the area surrounding the shrine, we didn't get any information about it at all but it seemed so different from the other shrines and temples that we have seen so far. This was after we had been walking around for several hours so we were pretty tired.


The city had a cool canal running through it with black carp swimming in it, and cool bridges crossing it every other block.