day three - kyoto!

Day three (Tuesday): we took the bullet train to Kyoto (massively expensive, scarily efficient, with departure and arrival times accurate to the minute). It was a little bit exciting at first because we actually got on the wrong train (a bullet train going from Tokyo to Kyoto that left three minutes earlier than our train did - we should have known) but the conductor was very nice and sorted us out properly, giving us an incomprehensible book of apparently every single train going in any direction anywhere in Japan at any time during May 2010 which was very helpful, especially to me. However, we did manage to get on the correct train eventually and we were in Kyoto by late morning, and checked into our guesthouse, which was BEAUTIFUL - a traditional ryokan set in a gorgeous landscaped garden, water features everywhere. There was a lot of shoe removal - first you have to take off your street shoes and put them in a little wooden locker at the bottom of the stairs, then you have a pair of leather slippers to wear up the stairs (they did not have any big enough for Jonathan. The lady had to go get a special pair which they probably keep in a safe somewhere for when really tall people come to stay, and he still had three inches of heel hanging off the back), and then when you go into your room (beautiful room with traditional shoji screens and tatami mats and a low tea table) you take off the slippers. We had tea poured for us while they explained the bath procedure (different wooden shoes, special kimono outfit) for the traditional baths downstairs (more on that later) and then we ventured out.

We took the bus to Kinkakuji shrine, which is a gold painted templey arrangement set in the middle of a lake with very pretty surrounding gardens (this is going to sound very clichéd, but everything looks so eerily like a Japanese print, with cherry trees and pines and Japanese maple trees and little pagodas and artistic clumps of rocks everywhere, that it is quite surreal). From there we walked to Ryoanji, another shrine-within-pretty-gardens down the road, which is famous primarily for a rock garden which consists of a bed of perfectly groomed white gravel with fifteen seemingly randomly placed boulders set in it (the trick is that it is impossible to see all fifteen at once unless you are “truly enlightened,” (or really tall, or have a helicopter, maybe), and so you are supposed to sit there and meditate upon the meaning of that. It was a little difficult to concentrate on my meditation when there were school groups of about two hundred navy-uniformed adolescents shrieking at top volume and taking pictures of each other with their fingers held up in a V on their cell phone cameras, so instead we gave up and just wandered around the gardens (again, exquisite) and into the tea shop, where we ended up having a very nice lunch. The food wasn’t particularly memorable (tofu and vegetables with some additional fun mystery ingredients, all immaculately laid out on trays, the whole elegant tea thing) but the setting was to die for - we were sitting cross legged on little cushions at a low table, and through the open screen window we had a view of the beautiful garden with babbling water feature (with carp sub-feature), stone statue feature, etc.

After all that peaceful meditative simplicity, we decided to amp up the crass capitalism, and we headed to the shopping arcade, which is targeted to the broadest demographic range of any shopping mall I think I have ever been to. There were loud video game arcades, where you could put money in a slot to win a chance at a large scary pink fluffy animal bigger than yourself, elegant little confectionery shops, a place that sold fruit and vegetable seeds, a print shop that sold old maps and prints (I definitely did not go in and spend more money than I really should have in that one), a home decorating fabric store, fresh fishmongers with burly guys slapping around in rubber aprons and wellies, florists, high end clothing boutiques, etc. We also saw some fashion to prove that the Japanese are not all conservative conformists when it comes to clothes: Jonathan spotted a guy wearing a pair of Micky Mouse ears, a mini skirt and tights, with large calf length furry boots, and I was impressed by the number of teeny bopper girls who were dressed (frankly) like prostitutes (ripped lace, garter belts, hot pants, bras) who couldn’t possibly have been prostitutes because a) they were so many of them and b) to all other respects they looked like gangs of teenage girls just hanging out with their friends in the evenings. (Ooh, we also paid a visit to a department store to confirm Eugene’s story that in posh department stores here you can buy single perfect cantaloupe melons that cost $100 - he is wrong, they sell for $150, and they come nestled in their own little Styrofoam fluffy thing with a gold sticker and a pink or blue ribbon on them, as if they are newborns in a nursery.

By eight pm the shops were closing up and our feet were about to fall off, so we headed back to the hotel for a nap and a bath; we couldn’t have a nap because they hadn’t put out our beds for us (I forgot to mention when we first got our room, there were no beds because the futons are kept in a special cupboard) so I went downstairs to try out the bath thingy. First you have to get dressed up to go down there in your special kimono dressing gown business and slippers, and then when you get down there you undress again, and then you have a shower before you can have a bath, and finally you get to have a bath in this enormous beautiful stone tub with citrus fruits bobbing around in it so that everything smells like orange blossoms (even my feet, by the end of it, which was quite a, er, feat). The water is super hot so you hop in and out between the cold shower and the boiling bath, and then you get back into your dressing gown and slippers and go back upstairs, to find that they still haven‘t put the futons out because they can‘t believe that you are so pathetic as to need to go to sleep at 8:30 at night and besides Jonathan was getting that cagey/sheepish I-was-sort-of-thinking-about-going-to-get-some-more-food look (we had opted against an official dinner because we had been snacking on street foot all afternoon) so… out of the dressing gown, into street clothes again, and out we headed, this time to a little noodle shop down a dark hidden alley way full of gorgeous funky old wooden two story traditional houses (passing three bona fide geishas on their way to work, accompanying an elderly guy with a cane, which got me thinking all kinds of inappropriate and vulgar things, but which I know is not really the point of geishas, it‘s all about the ceremonial and cultural bits blah blah blah). Yummy udon noodles with spring onions in broth, then staggered home to bed, where they had finally put out the futons with blissful white fluffy duvets and I was asleep in about thirty seconds flat.