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Japan Day 8 - Kyoto
Today basically I dragged Nykkel around Kyoto, showing him temples, shrines, castles, and tons of Hello Kitty garbage.
Right, so anyway, this morning we got up super-mega-hyper early, leaving the ryokan by 7:15 to get to Tokyo station by 8... we had tickets for the 8:10 Hikari shinkansen to Kyoto. Fortunately we hit Tokyo station around 7:45 so it was all good, we even had time to stop at a bakery and grab some food to bring on the train and all, and we were in our seats 5 mins before the train left, etc. Good stuff. The train ride there wasn't too exciting. I looked outside the windows a lot and eventually fell asleep for like an hour; it was a 2 and a half hour train ride between the two cities. Ponder that a second though - Kyoto and Tokyo are around 270 miles apart if I recall correctly, and we got there in 150 minutes. Meaning the train was definitely going over 100 miles per hour at some points. Cool stuff. And still smooth enough for me to sleep through significant parts of the ride.
So, we got to Kyoto. I have this great idea now which involves me hiring myself out as a tour guide, since I apparently have a really good knack for figuring out these sorts of touristy things. First thing we did outside the trains was I went and got Kyoto bus and walking maps from the Kyoto Tourism Center in the station; then I said to Nykkel, "Okay, we're going to Kinkakuji first, then maybe Ryoanji, then Nijo Castle, then Ginkakuji and the philosopher's path, then Nanzenji... how's that sound? No objection? Good. Get an all-day bus pass like I'm doing and we're gonna hop on the 205 bus in a second."
So we did just that. Our first stop was Kinkakuji for two reasons: 1) I figured it was the furthest out thing we were interested in seeing and 2) I didn't get to see it on my trip to Japan in 2001 because I'd forgotten my passport at the youth hostel. So. We went there. We saw this big golden temple thingy. It was big and it was golden. There were nice gardens around it too. I made a point of burning incense at the shrine (and since it was 3 mai for 20 yen I made Nykkel burn one too), and Nykkel got one of those fortune thingies, which seemed to be of moderately good luck, but we couldn't actually read it, heh.
After that we were going to go to Ryoanji, which was either a mile walk or waiting for a bus, but we got sick of waiting so we decided to bag it and just go to Nijo. (I was vaguely interested in Ryoanji because it is near Ritsumeikan Daigaku, where Shigetoshi Hasegawa went to college, and I thought that'd be neat to see, but umm, yeah, I can be a fangirl on my own time) Got the 204 bus, rode across town, got off, went to Nijo.
I had actually been to Nijo-jou three years ago, but it was still neat to go back. It's one of the Tokugawa castles, and it has these floors with special clamps in them so the boards squeak and sound like nightingales. It's really fun when a huge tourgroup is walking through since they squeak and chirp like crazy. So we went through there and saw all the rooms and things and some shogun figures they had setup and whatnot. Then we went through the Nijo gardens, which were also REALLY nice this time of year; full of Sakura trees and some other sort of white flower, I think a kind of dogwood. From the top of one of the guard gate thingies, you could see a ton of the city, including Daimonjiyama, which I had only seen from the top, previously. So that was cool.
After that we continued on the 204 bus to Ginkakuji because Nykkel had expressed interest in the "Philosopher's Path", which is the walk along the canals with cherry blossom trees, between Ginkakuji and Nanzenji. He wasn't that interested in Ginkakuji and in retrospect I feel bad for dragging him in there since it wasn't as interesting as I remembered it being. Maybe it was the light preventing me from getting good pictures, or something, but... besides, HEY, this LJ pic I use with this entry is ALREADY a picture of me at Ginkakuji :) So hmm. Oh, and to Brad, Carl, and Oren: apparently April isn't the right time of year to be continually accosted by schoolchildren, since none of them even remotely tried to talk to us.
I found a ton of crazy Hello Kitty Kyoto stuff all day, which I have not been mentioning because I don't think anyone wants to know about it. I bought a few small things, and in one store took a picture of all of the crazy HK stuff.
The Philosopher's walk was actually really nice, it was like a mile down a big cherry blossom path. It was really pretty and I enjoyed walking it a lot. It does not, however, actually go to Nanzenji; it ends about 1/3 of a mile from it. So we were vaguely lost and had to figure out how to get to Nanzenji because I knew how to get to the city buses from there... so we got to Nanzenji and then I realized that if the wall thingy was closed and we couldn't go up it, there wasn't THAT much to do there without walking for a while and finding the aqueducts and all. So we left. Eventually we found Sanjodoori and the stop for the 5 bus. We were literally 100 feet or so from the Higashiyama Youth Hostel when we waited for the bus... I got severe deja vu. (HY YH was the first place the four of us stayed in Japan on my trip in 2001.)
I had thought originally of taking the 5 bus to Teramachi or Kawaramachi or whatever covered mall area and getting dinner, but then I realized I didn't know how far it actually was from the station and it'd be bad if we got stranded somewhere and didn't make it back for the train at 8pm, and it was 6pm when we got on the 5 bus, so I decided to just ride the bus all the way to the eki. (I admired the 3-story Book-Off on the way, of course.) We went to look for food in the eki and mostly failed; there was a "Restaurant Road" on the 11th floor of the department store but it was hugely overpriced; we ended up in the B2F floor looking around at food and bento stalls and eventually I got a box of gyoza and some nigiri, and Nykkel got an inari/futomaki bento and some nigiri, and we got some sweets, and OH I found the COOLEST toy in a random souvenir store, it's a REMOTE-CONTROLLED MARIO KART! DUDE! Talk about impulse buys, it was like 10 bucks though and I mean, it's a reallife MARIO KART! Whee! Okay, I'm a dork. Anyway, I got a toy, and some junk food (this weird chocolate fondue sticks candy thing which is like Toppo but not crackers), and then we got to the trains majorly early. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.
Spent the trip back writing a few postcards (I have less addresses than I thought, oops; one of my Kyoto postcard sets was of a Buddha and I realized I didn't know Heidi's address, for example), and reading a little, and sleeping for an hour or so; I literally remember nothing between passing through Shizuoka and getting to the Tokyo station. Sleepily I followed Nykkel through the Tokyo station onto the Marunouchi line and I think we even had a conversation on the subway train, but the next thing I really remember is playing PNM in the arcade near the station, and getting a Hello Kitty out of the UFO catcher on my first try, and then I came up here to do a brain dump of today.
So yeah. To sum up: today == 6 hours or so on trains, 9 hours in Kyoto. I know they say you can't do a day trip of Kyoto but I think we had a pretty good time and saw a lot of cool stuff, and I finally saw Kinkakuji, and... yeah. And tomorrow we go to the Giants-Swallows baseball game! Wheeeeeee!
While I'm at it I have two philosophical points I want to brain-dump:
1) I actually have started to enjoy playing UFO catchers for the heck of it, not just for the desire of getting the prize. This frightens me.
2) In the last week I have seen many mixed racial couples here. They have been, 99% of the time, a Japanese woman and a caucasian man, in any stage from just a teenage couple to a guy with his wife and kids. I think I have seen TWO couples that were the opposite way and both times it was a Japanese sarariman and a blonde busty woman. I have to wonder why this is the case. Is it because of the stereotype that American guys go after Japanese girls because they're cuter, or supposedly "easier", or what? Or is it that American girls don't go after Japanese guys, or perhaps that Japanese guys wouldn't consider American girls anywhere near cute enough in general compared to Japanese women? This is what I was thinking about while walking down the Philosopher's Path thingy. I think I said something out loud about it to Nykkel but he wasn't really in a chatty mood at the time.
I guess it was only reinforced by later when on the bus there was a caucasian guy with a Japanese girl and he was literally all over her. I don't think I've really seen much excessive PDA in Japan *except* involving caucasian guys, actually. (There was another couple the other day on the subway.) Maybe it's just the sort of thing I notice again, but eh. It just seems odd. Or maybe for some reason I'm just not seeing the caucasian-woman-with-Japanese-guy couples... they just aren't around anywhere I am?
You know, I just reread the last paragraph or two and debated whether someone might take it the wrong way, but eh, it's what's on my mind and I'm honestly wondering about it, so. Feel free to discuss it instead of kit-kats.
Right, so anyway, this morning we got up super-mega-hyper early, leaving the ryokan by 7:15 to get to Tokyo station by 8... we had tickets for the 8:10 Hikari shinkansen to Kyoto. Fortunately we hit Tokyo station around 7:45 so it was all good, we even had time to stop at a bakery and grab some food to bring on the train and all, and we were in our seats 5 mins before the train left, etc. Good stuff. The train ride there wasn't too exciting. I looked outside the windows a lot and eventually fell asleep for like an hour; it was a 2 and a half hour train ride between the two cities. Ponder that a second though - Kyoto and Tokyo are around 270 miles apart if I recall correctly, and we got there in 150 minutes. Meaning the train was definitely going over 100 miles per hour at some points. Cool stuff. And still smooth enough for me to sleep through significant parts of the ride.
So, we got to Kyoto. I have this great idea now which involves me hiring myself out as a tour guide, since I apparently have a really good knack for figuring out these sorts of touristy things. First thing we did outside the trains was I went and got Kyoto bus and walking maps from the Kyoto Tourism Center in the station; then I said to Nykkel, "Okay, we're going to Kinkakuji first, then maybe Ryoanji, then Nijo Castle, then Ginkakuji and the philosopher's path, then Nanzenji... how's that sound? No objection? Good. Get an all-day bus pass like I'm doing and we're gonna hop on the 205 bus in a second."
So we did just that. Our first stop was Kinkakuji for two reasons: 1) I figured it was the furthest out thing we were interested in seeing and 2) I didn't get to see it on my trip to Japan in 2001 because I'd forgotten my passport at the youth hostel. So. We went there. We saw this big golden temple thingy. It was big and it was golden. There were nice gardens around it too. I made a point of burning incense at the shrine (and since it was 3 mai for 20 yen I made Nykkel burn one too), and Nykkel got one of those fortune thingies, which seemed to be of moderately good luck, but we couldn't actually read it, heh.
After that we were going to go to Ryoanji, which was either a mile walk or waiting for a bus, but we got sick of waiting so we decided to bag it and just go to Nijo. (I was vaguely interested in Ryoanji because it is near Ritsumeikan Daigaku, where Shigetoshi Hasegawa went to college, and I thought that'd be neat to see, but umm, yeah, I can be a fangirl on my own time) Got the 204 bus, rode across town, got off, went to Nijo.
I had actually been to Nijo-jou three years ago, but it was still neat to go back. It's one of the Tokugawa castles, and it has these floors with special clamps in them so the boards squeak and sound like nightingales. It's really fun when a huge tourgroup is walking through since they squeak and chirp like crazy. So we went through there and saw all the rooms and things and some shogun figures they had setup and whatnot. Then we went through the Nijo gardens, which were also REALLY nice this time of year; full of Sakura trees and some other sort of white flower, I think a kind of dogwood. From the top of one of the guard gate thingies, you could see a ton of the city, including Daimonjiyama, which I had only seen from the top, previously. So that was cool.
After that we continued on the 204 bus to Ginkakuji because Nykkel had expressed interest in the "Philosopher's Path", which is the walk along the canals with cherry blossom trees, between Ginkakuji and Nanzenji. He wasn't that interested in Ginkakuji and in retrospect I feel bad for dragging him in there since it wasn't as interesting as I remembered it being. Maybe it was the light preventing me from getting good pictures, or something, but... besides, HEY, this LJ pic I use with this entry is ALREADY a picture of me at Ginkakuji :) So hmm. Oh, and to Brad, Carl, and Oren: apparently April isn't the right time of year to be continually accosted by schoolchildren, since none of them even remotely tried to talk to us.
I found a ton of crazy Hello Kitty Kyoto stuff all day, which I have not been mentioning because I don't think anyone wants to know about it. I bought a few small things, and in one store took a picture of all of the crazy HK stuff.
The Philosopher's walk was actually really nice, it was like a mile down a big cherry blossom path. It was really pretty and I enjoyed walking it a lot. It does not, however, actually go to Nanzenji; it ends about 1/3 of a mile from it. So we were vaguely lost and had to figure out how to get to Nanzenji because I knew how to get to the city buses from there... so we got to Nanzenji and then I realized that if the wall thingy was closed and we couldn't go up it, there wasn't THAT much to do there without walking for a while and finding the aqueducts and all. So we left. Eventually we found Sanjodoori and the stop for the 5 bus. We were literally 100 feet or so from the Higashiyama Youth Hostel when we waited for the bus... I got severe deja vu. (HY YH was the first place the four of us stayed in Japan on my trip in 2001.)
I had thought originally of taking the 5 bus to Teramachi or Kawaramachi or whatever covered mall area and getting dinner, but then I realized I didn't know how far it actually was from the station and it'd be bad if we got stranded somewhere and didn't make it back for the train at 8pm, and it was 6pm when we got on the 5 bus, so I decided to just ride the bus all the way to the eki. (I admired the 3-story Book-Off on the way, of course.) We went to look for food in the eki and mostly failed; there was a "Restaurant Road" on the 11th floor of the department store but it was hugely overpriced; we ended up in the B2F floor looking around at food and bento stalls and eventually I got a box of gyoza and some nigiri, and Nykkel got an inari/futomaki bento and some nigiri, and we got some sweets, and OH I found the COOLEST toy in a random souvenir store, it's a REMOTE-CONTROLLED MARIO KART! DUDE! Talk about impulse buys, it was like 10 bucks though and I mean, it's a reallife MARIO KART! Whee! Okay, I'm a dork. Anyway, I got a toy, and some junk food (this weird chocolate fondue sticks candy thing which is like Toppo but not crackers), and then we got to the trains majorly early. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.
Spent the trip back writing a few postcards (I have less addresses than I thought, oops; one of my Kyoto postcard sets was of a Buddha and I realized I didn't know Heidi's address, for example), and reading a little, and sleeping for an hour or so; I literally remember nothing between passing through Shizuoka and getting to the Tokyo station. Sleepily I followed Nykkel through the Tokyo station onto the Marunouchi line and I think we even had a conversation on the subway train, but the next thing I really remember is playing PNM in the arcade near the station, and getting a Hello Kitty out of the UFO catcher on my first try, and then I came up here to do a brain dump of today.
So yeah. To sum up: today == 6 hours or so on trains, 9 hours in Kyoto. I know they say you can't do a day trip of Kyoto but I think we had a pretty good time and saw a lot of cool stuff, and I finally saw Kinkakuji, and... yeah. And tomorrow we go to the Giants-Swallows baseball game! Wheeeeeee!
While I'm at it I have two philosophical points I want to brain-dump:
1) I actually have started to enjoy playing UFO catchers for the heck of it, not just for the desire of getting the prize. This frightens me.
2) In the last week I have seen many mixed racial couples here. They have been, 99% of the time, a Japanese woman and a caucasian man, in any stage from just a teenage couple to a guy with his wife and kids. I think I have seen TWO couples that were the opposite way and both times it was a Japanese sarariman and a blonde busty woman. I have to wonder why this is the case. Is it because of the stereotype that American guys go after Japanese girls because they're cuter, or supposedly "easier", or what? Or is it that American girls don't go after Japanese guys, or perhaps that Japanese guys wouldn't consider American girls anywhere near cute enough in general compared to Japanese women? This is what I was thinking about while walking down the Philosopher's Path thingy. I think I said something out loud about it to Nykkel but he wasn't really in a chatty mood at the time.
I guess it was only reinforced by later when on the bus there was a caucasian guy with a Japanese girl and he was literally all over her. I don't think I've really seen much excessive PDA in Japan *except* involving caucasian guys, actually. (There was another couple the other day on the subway.) Maybe it's just the sort of thing I notice again, but eh. It just seems odd. Or maybe for some reason I'm just not seeing the caucasian-woman-with-Japanese-guy couples... they just aren't around anywhere I am?
You know, I just reread the last paragraph or two and debated whether someone might take it the wrong way, but eh, it's what's on my mind and I'm honestly wondering about it, so. Feel free to discuss it instead of kit-kats.
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