Week 4: Ohhhh Big Buddha, Big Buddha, Big Buddha. Oh yeah.....Big Buddha

Hello friends and family! We bring to you another post from Japan!

 This weekend we went to visit the Daibutsu in Kamakura! "Daibutsu" is Japanese for "Great Buddha". It is a bronze statue of Buddha that is 43 feet high and weighs about 267,000 pounds. The Japanese have several statues of Buddha, but this one is notable because it was the subject of Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Buddha at Kamakura". It is estimated to have been built in 1252.

We took a trip inside the Buddha (there are stairs inside it) and were able to view the inside. On the way home, we tried some Japanese sweets called "kintsuba". Here is a video so you can see it all!


This week also brought us some good news -- we were offered a house! It is a 3-bedroom, 2 1/2 bath "row house" (about 5 houses that are all connected as one building) and we have a local playground basically right in our backyard. It is in the Sagamihara Housing Area (SHA), which is about 3 km away from the rest of Camp Zama.

The house is available to move into on October 4. So we have to stay in our temporary lodging (two-bedroom-with-living-room hotel suite) for another month. However, the silver lining is that, while we are staying in temporary lodging, the army gives us an allotment every ten days to cover the cost of our room as well as food and other stuff like that... and the allotment that they give us is a lot more than what we actually spend. And we get that every ten days. So we're just saving up money left and right!

We originally had planned to go without a car for the entire three years we lived here, and just take the trains and buses, but for several reasons we are now officially planning on getting a car, the main reason being that it is far easier and cheaper to have a car here than we had been previously led to expect according to online sources. Specifically:

1) You can get a decent used car for well under $4000 here. For example, there is currently a used but great condition 2004 Nissan family van being sold for $2500.
2) Insurance is only about $300-400 for two YEARS (IF you are military).
3) The process of getting a driver's license in Japan (IF you are military) is just to take a few-hour class and then take a written test. Boom. You're licensed.
4) The normal inspections that cost the Japanese a fair amount of money are much cheaper for military members.
5) It costs about $8 for us to go to church by train every week. That's far more than we'd spend in gas driving to church, even though gas is a little more expensive here.

Anyway, we plan on taking the driver's tests next week, and then getting a car soon thereafter.

We have lots of good plans for upcoming trips, so stay tuned!

Love,
Brittany and Christian