Day One of SSDM and Pictures from Kamakura

The first day of my conference is over. It was much like any other conference (some good talks, some bad), except the language issue was more prevalent today, since the conference is in English, and fewer than 5% of the people at the conference giving presentations are native speakers. It really made the people with good English skills stand out. Anyway, that's not really that interesting, so I'll just move on to a picture dump from my day in Kamakura.

The picture interface for this blog is relaly clumsy, but with some help from powerpoint, I'm organized the pictures into a semi reasonable format.

Here are pictures from Engaku-ji. The bell is famously large:









Here are some pictures from Hachimangu:










Here are some pictures from Sasuke-Inari Ginja. The walkway through the red gates was really cool.














The set of pictures highlights from of the wonderful grounds at the various temples:
























Here are some pictures from the Daibatsu. The slippers, by the way, are about five feet long:













Finally, I came across a grave in which there were a number of alcoholic beverage bottles placed on the grave stone. For some reason, I thought this was amusing, I guess because you would never do that in the U.S., but honestly, if the deceased was a big beer fan, why not?