tea house in front of floating cloud shrine, kasuga taisha

I met a monk near this tea house. He wore a black robe (not shown in this picture).

He was staring at me anxiously. I nodded at him and said hello. He pointed at my backpack. I didn't know what he meant, so I opened it and let him take a look (it's OK to do this in Japan but not in other countries).

He pointed at my ichimatsu doll. I told him I found it at Hakodate. He shook his head. Perhaps he disagreed on what I did, or perhaps he didn't understand what I said: I couldn't tell which is which.

He spoke to me in Japanese which I couldn't understand. He sighed and tried to speak English. He said something like "Kada". I asked him if "Kada" is a nice place to eat? He shook his head and asked me for paper. He scribbled something down on paper.

I recognized the three kanji words "Wakayama", which is listed on my lonely planet. I could tell the other two characters is Kada. He also wrote the name of a shrine in Japanese characters. The first two letter is "A" and "WA", but I couldn't tell the next two. It wasn't a big problem. I could easily search it up on the Internet. I thanked the monk and head towards Kasuga Taisha.

That night, it didn't take me long to find out the name Awashima Jinja and I decided to head there the next day (I had to delay my original plan of going to the Ikoma Zan).