Adventures in Japan

Today we visited Japan

It's been a long time coming, but we finally left the city of Osaka and saw another part of Japan. Okay, it was only about 45 minutes away, but Kyoto is a major tourist destination. It was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years, so it's all full of temples and shrines and "Important Cultural Properties". Plus, it's rather pretty.

We took a train to get there. It was a nice change from the subway. We got to sit facing forward, and we could see more than just tunnel walls through the windows. Plus it was cheap. The train, I mean, not Kyoto. Kyoto was expensive. Everything seemed to cost more, even the vending machines. Actually, I think Kyoto has cheap buses, but we wouldn't know. We walked everywhere.


We started at the visitor info center, which wasn't really all that helpful. Not that the people there weren't nice, just that they didn't have any of the information we were looking for. Maybe there's another one somewhere else that all the English-speaking tourists use. But the visitor info center just happened to be across the street from the Heian Jingu shrine, which was on our list of sights to see (recommended by really for real Japanese people). Today there were 3, 5, and 7 year old children all dressed up in kimono and such for the Shichi-Go-San festival, which we thought was strange, because that's not supposed to happen until November 15. I guess they were there to beat the rush. But they were cute, anyway.


From there, we wandered around for a bit, enjoying the pretty leaves and watching gussied up kids and their families walk to and from the shrine. Eventually we made it to Chion-in temple, which was not on our list, but far be it from us to turn up our noses. The gate in the picture is apparently the largest in Japan. It's also got a lot of steep steps up to the temple, but those aren't mentioned in any of the tourist literature that we've seen, so they can't be the steepest. Up at the top we looked in on some of the temple halls (also pretty large). What we saw was a lot of dark wood, a lot of gold, and a couple of big statues. There were apparently some painted paper screens up there too, but we would have had to pay to see them, so we, uh, didn't.


From there we walked through what I think was Maruyama Park, where we heard an American busker sing Hey Jude. I couldn't help but think of karaoke. His amplifier even added that fake karaoke reverberation to his voice. We also saw turtles and birds and ducks that looked kind of like chickens.


Then there was a long, uphill street leading to Kiyomizu-dera temple. It was crowded (the street and the temple). But the temple had a great view of the city, supposedly best at sunset. As we waited for the sun to go down so we could take our picture(s), I was struck by the number of Japanese men sightseeing in business suits. I was also a bit surprised at how little English (or any other non-Japanese language) we saw the whole time we were in Kyoto. I thought that as a major tourist destination, there would be multilingual signs and brochures everywhere. Guess not.

Once the sun was down, we walked through Gion, the geisha district. I gotta say, I felt a little sorry for geisha we saw. They have their own tourist paparazzi everywhere they go (outside the tea houses, at least). Whenever we saw a crowd of people with cameras waiting in the street, we knew why. Those girls are either very patient, or hide their irritation very well. I know I couldn't handle that every night.


I made at least two other discoveries in Kyoto. First: even better than yakiniku is First Kitchen's yakiniku dog. The meat is tender and spicy, and the roll is soft and chewy. Mmmmm. Second: I found the best engrish shirt EVER.