Nagoya, Nagoya desu: Ise

This past Sunday, I hopped on the Kintetsu train line out of Nagoya and went to a small city on the south end of the Mie Prefecture called Ise.

Ise is known for two very famous shrines, called the Inner and Outer Shrine. Above is the outer shrine. These places are beautiful, but I'm starting to think that every shrine in Japan is famous or well known. I have yet to have someone to tell me, you need to visit this Shrine, its just over there.

Because it's a shrine, you need to wash yourself before you enter, but because this place is so popular, they needed to set up the bath for a large volume of people. So walking up to the entrance, I came upon this:

Kind of like a pre-shrine party. This bath is much larger then normal, and I thought it was kind of cool all the people here becoming pure. Here are some more photos from Ise; Click Here

I'm Lucky, I Have No Food Allergies

Let me explain this thought. People who I work with have a hard time eating a lot of things in Japan and limit their diet to American style food. The worst case scenario of this, I was at a restaurant with a large group of people. Upon being served food, one person proclaimed "I ain't going to eat no fish." I was a little confused, it would have been so much more quiet to simply say "no thank you," or something.

But most foods here is new, and tasty even though much of this stuff looks weird to the western eye. But once you understand everyone else is eating everything here and doing just fine, you can set aside much of the fear and just enjoy. While in Ise, I enjoyed snails, cooked right inside the shell and served by removing cap and eating what's inside. It looks like this:

That snall is really really good. I'm constantly taking photos of normal food that I think is crazy. From another trip, here is baby raw squid that I ate in this city called Okazaki: