Was it obvious I liked this place very much? This checked off one major item from my bucket list, the night market, even if I would have preferred if it was a summer festival or a permanent night market. I’m sure I’ll experience both of those in the future, though.

I bought two pieces of food here, one being a hashimaki, which is apparently an okonomiyaki wrapped around a pair of chopsticks (which are called hashi in Japanese), with a half-fried egg (concealed by toppings in the picture) on top of it:

That was 400 yen and was very interesting and delicious — half of it was eaten like an ice cream cone since it was wrapped around the chopsticks, but it was too heavy for the thing so the other half had dropped off onto the oil paper, but that was fine as the chopsticks could then be peeled apart and the rest of it picked up like one normally would with those chopsticks. Finally, I had some yakisoba as well, for 500 yen:

Most of the vendors asked “ima taberu?” when I bought something from them, inquiring whether I was going to eat it there or bring it home. For those buying to bring home, which was a significant portion of the festival-goers, they got a rubberband around the box (or got a box in general if it was normally given out on paper or packets).

I wandered around the festival for slightly over an hour before I left, having followed the stalls south toward Asakusa Station. The stalls soon opened out to regular commercial areas:

At this point, I reached the station, and I meant to go home. However, it was not yet to be. This station was the Asakusa Station for the Tsukuba Express line, which was a separate line that I would have had to take to Akihabara, and then transfer to another line to get home, and it seemed like I would have to double dip on fares so it would end up being a 400 yen or so trip. I was feeling cheap after spending some money on festival food, and besides, I saw that one of the exits from this Tsukuba Express station, heading in the direction of the regular Asakusa Station (where I would be able to take the regular Tokyo Metro Ginza Line home for around 200 yen), actually led towards Sensoji.

Sensoji, or Asakusa Kannon Temple, is the main temple to Kannon, or Kwanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, which my extended and direct family follows or at least deeply respects. It’s apparently the oldest temple in Tokyo, and although my sister alerted me to possibly visiting it if I had time, I was not actually planning to as it was not on my way to anything and I had no plans to visit that part of Asakusa initially. I tend to be rather free-wheeling and deciding my itinerary as I go, only setting broad goals and often going a different way on the fly if some street looks interesting, so Sensoji wasn’t even on my radar up until I was leaving the wrong Asakusa Station and heading to the correct one and realized that it was on the way. Well, I wasnt going to say no to fate, so I headed that way.

The temple itself was gorgeous at night, especially since I could also see Tokyo Skytree in the background: Apparently it’s one of the main pilgrimage sites in Japan — it actually is claimed (local) to be the most visited temple in Japan and the most-frequented spiritual site in the world, but I don’t know how to verify that. However, I do know that it was sparse but still active even late at night, and it looks gorgeous when lit up with lanterns.

And whoa, the temple. i had chills as I approached. Oddly enough, it started to drizzle as I left Asakusa Station and headed over here, only the second time since I came to Japan that it had rained, with the first time also being a drizzle at night and the early morning on one of the first days when I was in my Takadanobaba lodging. It drizzled a little right up until I got to the temple and queued up for the shrine to toss my 100 yen offering into the altar and make a wish. The drizzle then stopped somewhere around then. Kami’s watching over me?

The Nakamise-dori shops that line the street leading up to the temple looked great at night too, even though they were mostly closed. I liked the way the leaves that lean over the shop eaves were illuminated.

The street eventually opened up into a covered shopping street and then the correct Asakusa Station, where I took the Ginza line home.

Although I got home somewhat early this evening, I had a little bit of trouble at night trying to find a hotel for my next place the following day, since I hadn’t really booked the details of my trip out any further in advance, and hadnt realized that it was much harder to find lodging in smaller cities and towns outside of the Tokyo region. I’ll leave the results of all that for the next blog post though.