Eating things only with chopsticks

I've made it pretty obvious that I love Kamakura. No matter how times I've been, there is always more to explore or someone to introduce to something I've previously fallen in love with or favorites to see again. Today's trip was most of the latter two options. With Blake preparing for his next TAD soon and a move and other life changes closer on the horizon than we will ever be truly prepared for, we are trying to be proactive about visiting favorites potentially for the last time (at least together) and crossing things off our Japan bucket list. 

Blake really wanted to make sure we visited our favorite restaurant again, the one we just happened to find on our very first Japan outing and take as many people to as we can, so we built a Kamakura day around that. 

Lunch was delicious as always. We love yakiniku so much that we have our own tabletop grill for it at home now, but this place is so good and the lunch price is excellent, so it's worth the trip. 

Following lunch, we went to a chopsticks store that we feel is like Ollivander's wand shop from Harry Potter, where the wand chooses the wizard. There are fancy and fun chopsticks of all price ranges, many of which you can have a name engraved on. We've purchased several of these for gifts in the last two years, but we hadn't yet purchased any for ourselves. More on what we picked in a few paragraphs, when it's time to pick them up. 

A few days ago, I asked Blake if he had been to the bamboo forest in Kamakura yet. "Nope!" he responded. "Have I taken everyone but you!?" I queried and resolved to fix that today. It's a small but gorgeous garden on the grounds the Hokoku-ji Temple, and we enjoyed a stroll whilst our chopsticks were engraved.

Our first (or preferred, in Blake's case) names are written on each chopstick, one in hiragana, one in katakana, which I wrote out myself on the order from. My Japanese handwriting still isn't great, but it was sufficient today!

In case you can't read Japanese, mine is the pink with the inlaid mother of pearl and Blake's is the blue with wood. The hiragana is on the left of each set, katakana on the right.

Finally, we topped off the day at what seems to be our favorite Kamakura ice cream shop with their latest creation, a five layer ice cream!

From top to bottom - matcha, purple sweet potato, blue Ramune soda, strawberry, and vanilla.

It was a lovely outing. I hope that wherever we live in the future we can find little places like this that we enjoy revisiting over and over again.