Leaving Ueda City, took the next train back to Nagano City to meet up with my senior who had came from Tokyo. We had planned to head over to the Zenkoji temple in Nagano City, which was having its celebration of unveiling the statue of a secret Buddha. The rain was definitely getting annoying by now, as it was still pouring despite being near noon.
Took a bus from the Nagano station to the temple. Went to the designated meeting place but couldn’t see my senior, so decided to ring her using a public phone. Apparently she had been waiting for me for an hour but I was running late due to my stint in Ueda. Finally caught up with her up ahead and we headed into the temple grounds among a huge crowd of devotees. A long rope was in place and was being pulled by the temple volunteers to create a part for an oncoming procession.
The procession was led by a group of small children all in full ceremony regalia, followed by monks and priests. There were also a group of monks playing on their instrument as the procession headed on in. After watching it for some time, we decided to make a way for the queue to see the secret Buddha.
Problem was, there were also tons of other Japanese waiting in line to see the secret Buddha, and we couldn’t seem to find the end of the line. It stretched on far outside of the temple grounds. Both of us didn’t wanted to stand that long out in this freezing cold and wet weather, so we gave up the idea of lining up. At the same time, we overheard an Obachan saying that we could head over to the other side to get a glimpse of the secret Buddha if we didn’t wanted to line up that long for it. Took her word and headed over to the other end to try our luck.
One thing the Obachan missed out was that, you have to be very very very tall to be able to look into the main hall. We admitted defeat thanks to the freezing cold and wandered about the temple grounds instead.
The amount of people in the compound was too much for our liking, so we decided to head back to the Nagano station for lunch before heading on to our next stop, Matsumoto.
And it’ll be a few hundred more years before we would be able to catch another glimpse of the secret Bhuddha. Hope I’ll be able to wait in line by then.
この長い旅で 