Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto
English Sign Watch
There's a game on in finding the best bad-English signage -- for some reason,
Japanese advertisers love using English words in everything...whether it makes
sense or not. Most of these are just random signs, but I think "Hey! Say! JUMP!"
is a rock band and "One beautiful afternoon I piked strawberries in the forest"
came from a shower curtain I found in a housewares section of a department
store.
My favorite is still "Happy Price" though --
...because nothing works up a thirst like the thought of drinking your own bodily fluids....
...because nothing makes you want to spend money like imagining your own
entrails (or someone elses...preferably some used ones that you could possibly
get for a bargain price....)
Are they paying Japanese ad copymen in crack cocaine?
Heart of used what???
The Japanese version of what we'd think of as Hot Topic was a slice of a store in a strip of stores lining a street in Kyoto (not far from the 50s dudes mentioned below) called Mad Punk. The Japanese store dragged Hot Topic a few more steps towards the gates the hell with the black and the spikes and the arms and legs ripped off and laced back together with leather strings, and the harlequin socks and the skinny red plaid ties....and everything sized for a tinier audience, too, and nothing in the store meant for guys, at least based on the sizes.
A few shops further down, you could buy shoes, if you could make up your mind whether your foot was S, M, or L (or, sometimes LL, if they had an extra-large shoe). Kind of like a one-legged Payless, with just one shoe out on display, and all of them jumbled together, so you'd have to pick up a shoe and see if, Cindarella-like, it was your S, M, or L size or not, and then ask for the mate to it if you wanted to buy it.
Kinkaku-Ji Temple
The Golden Temple, although we had to take their word for it -- they wouldn't let us go right up to it to see if it really was overlaid with gold leaf :)
The surrounding grounds were a lovely walk through a very Japanese garden.
We stopped for a traditional Japanese tea party, including the handwashing ceremony outside, although you have to take off your socks outside and the socks were somewhat disreputable....
The tea was a very deep green (an aroma very much like deeply pounded grass clippings) and there was a ceremonial process of turning the bowl two times and you were supposed to drink the whole thing in five swallows total, but it was explained in Japanese so the gist of it was mostly figured out by watching other groups of actual Japanese women there who knew what they were doing. The white square was a cake of bean paste covered with a thick sugar icing and flourished with a stamp of gold leaf. Buddha smiled serenely behind us (I'm sure he has seen crazier socks).
Ryōjan-Ji Temple
The temple is really about the rock garden -- fifteen rocks in a big box of raked sand (a couple of them are somewhat submerged). It is supposed to be Zen and contemplative, but in reality there are were so many tourists and so much bustle and noise -- dozens of people clustered around the rock garden, waiting as if Shamu were about to come out and start his show. It was easy to imagine it as a lovely place without all the people around it -- including the surrounding areas, which were just starting to bloom with cherry blossoms.
Nanzen-Ji Temple
Wanted to get over to see Nanzen-Ji, but Kyoto is actually a really big city -- I had imagined it as a small walking tour of interconnecting temples (ha!). Nanzen-Ji is one of the most well known Rinzai Zen temples in Japan. One of the characteristics of its history is that its abbot was always chosen as the best Rinzai Zen Master in each period. Nanzen-Ji was over on the east side of Kyoto, and we didn't get over to that section, but here are the lyrics to the Bruce Cockburn song, which appears on his album, Further Adventures Of:
Nanzen-Ji
cooling wind
mind swept clean like arctic sand
White stone lake
crystal clear
I walk on the voices of nightingales
Pine-framed space
tiger leaps
emerald tea reflects the Lord
Imperial Palace
The gates to the Imperial Palace were closed, but the grounds around it (very reminiscent of the Mall in Washington, DC) were full of people walking their dogs and letting their children run wild (or perhaps it was the other way around).
Geisha Girls
In Kyoto, we took Keighley and Shelby to this place where they make you up
like a geisha and dress you up in kimonos and take pictures -- sort of Memoirs
of a Geisha meets America's Next Top Model, complete with really uncomfortable
shoes and everything :) Really interesting process -- it looked like white latex
paint they used at the beginning (!) -- they were pretty insistent that the
girls take it off right afterwards.
Who could move in those outfits? Courtesan my a**....! I'd stab the customer in
the eye with my parasol just to get out of that getup for five minutes to
escape. You could hide a carryon bag/five pounds of laundry/the evidence of some
hideous crime (broken up into several trips) in that bustle in the back.
(Clearly, I would not have passed the Geisha Iowa Test or whatever the screening
process was back in the day.)
And I don't know how you'd serve tea, much less be brave enough to have so much
as a sip of it, because there's no way you'd ever be able to go to the bathroom
with all that gear on. They made sure to tell them to use the rest room before
they got them all dressed up. What do those geishas know that we don't know???
50s Dudes
In the middle of downtown Kyoto, an American mix tape of old 1950s pop (mostly Elvis) attracted a crowd to watch the dancing and lip-syncing. The guy with the huge hair wasn't the best dancer, but he was the center of attention regardless with that fin.
Japanese TV
Too bizarre to explain...and you thought Teletubbies were weird....
Manga
One of the biggest sections in the bookstore.
