Adventures in Japan

Keepin' the culture police off our tail

I don't think any tourist can come to the Kansai area without visiting Kyoto. It's the big attraction 'round these parts. Or so everyone says. We couldn't not take the guys to see it. Plus, you know, Tyler works there. So off we went.

We started off at JR Kyoto station, which is something like 10 stories tall, with a glass-ceilinged concourse in the middle. There's a continuous stairway all the way to the roof, where the view might've been nice if it weren't such a dreary day. Pretty impressive for a train station. Did we take any pictures? No. But we do have a picture of Nate posing with a blue thing.


From there we hopped a bus to Kinkaku-ji, a temple almost completely covered in gold leaf. I thought it was pretty gaudy, but impressive nonetheless. I mean, that's a lot of gold. Plus there was a lot of green in the surrounding gardens, even though it's winter. That's a big plus in my books.


From Kinkaku-ji we public-transited ourselves to Nijo-jo, just in time for Tyler to leave for work. Poor guy. But at least today he had a really short commute.


Nijo-jo is a castle that was built with special "nightingale floors" that squeak no matter where you step on them. I guess the shogun really didn't want anyone sneaking up on him. (That's right, we're talkin' ninjas.) He also seemed to really want to impress visitors. The walls of all the audience rooms were covered in gilded paintings. As we squeakily shuffled past them hundreds of years later, they were dimly lit and I gotta say, not all that interesting. But to be fair, I was finding it hard to think about anything besides how cold my feet were in those ill-fitting vinyl visitors' slippers. The gardens around the castle were very nice, though. Especially when the sun was out.


All Kyoto's cultural stuff shuts down around 5:00, so we had some time to kill before Tyler got off work. The three of us ended up at a little hole-in-the-wall coffee place called Kokuma. It means baby bear. It's also the name of the proprietor, who was awfully nice to us, and made really good, labour-intensive coffee & tea. His English really wasn't too bad, either. He talked to us about this and that, gave us some free snacks (even some to take home!) and played for us some jazz records on his giant stereo. Like I said, nice guy. Too bad he doesn't seem to get much business. The whole time we were in there drinking free refills of the already quite reasonably priced coffee and/or tea, the only other people we saw were a cab driver that left shortly after we arrived, two neighbourhood girls that stopped in for some free candy, and Mrs. Kokuma. Pity. That place was pretty cool. Naked ladies on the walls and all.


There was only so much coffee we could drink without getting the shakes, so eventually we moved on, and met up with Tyler not long after. We went for drinks with a couple of people that he works with, and ate some izakaya food. Not used to the extra travel time associated with a night out in Kyoto, we almost missed our train back to Osaka. We had to catch a cab to the JR station to catch the last train that would get us back to Umeda in time to transfer to our last train home. Oops.

After a long ride back to the general vicinity of Orange House, we somehow mustered enough energy for karaoke. Or rather, Trevor and Tyler did. Nate spent most of his time playing with the futuristic karaoke controls (with a bit of singing here & there) and I pretty much sat back and recorded their performances for posterity. That is, until the battery on Tyler's camera died. Right in the middle of a Shatneresque rendition of Rocket Man, too.

As we were leaving, Trev arm wrestled a guy in the lobby. I'm not sure why.