Kamakura is listed in lots of guidebooks as one of the daytrips one can make from Tokyo. Since I always like to see a little more from a country than just the city i'm located in (even if 2 weeks in Tokyo is not enough to see everything) we decided to make a daytrip to Kamakura. We originally planned to do this on Tuesday, but the weather seemed to be better on Thursday, and with Kamakura having a beach, this is quite essential!
A little hungover we left our hotel at around 10, transfered trains at Yokohama station and arrived in Kamakura about one hour later. At Kamakura station we rented bikes, since the various sites are located too far from each other to do everything by foot. We decided to rent a bike for 3 hours and just see a couple of sites, in order not to get a temple/shrine/torii overkill. First stop was Daibutsu, Kamakura's giant Buddha statue which is about 13 meters high. For a astronomic amount for 20 yen (0.20€) you can also go inside of the huge statue. The next stop was Benzaiten shrine, a shrine build in a cave with the possibly to wash your money in sacred water in order to get it multiplied. I didn't test it with notes, but my coins haven't multiplied yet :(
Doing Kamakura on a bike is quite easy, since most of the sites are well signposted there, but nevertheless we managed to get lost a little on our way to Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū, Kamakura's biggest shrine, located beautifully on a mountain. With this shrine we've visited all 3 top-3 sites as mentioned on some tourist leaflet, returned our bikes and walked the 15 minutes to the beach to have a nice couple of hours there, my first dive in the pacific ocean! On the way to the beach we got some lunch at a local supermarket and missed the fact there are signs to beware of the hawks on the beach, so one Kamakura hawk ate a eggsandwich, and we didn't. Later on we saw some other tourists with their sandwiches, and we felt make pics of the inevitable hawk-attack was cooler than warning them ;)
After the beach we headed back to Tokyo, and like everyone does, we slept in the train. Our camera was in the luggage compartment above our heads, but Japan is a country with almost no crime, and it shows. When we woke up, it was still there. Back in Tokyo we refreshed and headed for Odaiba, an artifical island with great views of the city, some shoppingmalls, a Statue of Liberty-replica and the big Gundam statue. To get to Odaiba one has to take the completly automatic Yurikamome-train and sitting in front of the train the views of Tokyo are stunning. We did some shopping there, walked around a bit and had a bowl of Udon in the foodcourt of one of the malls, before we got back to our hotel.