November 20 2010 / Kyoto, Japan

So I got up in the morning, all packed and ready to go out and adventure into Japan with Julie for the next couple of days.  The big trick was that she had a SAS trip that she was going on that would take her into Kyoto to see some of the temples and gardens there, and I was going to try to hop onto the trip as well in order to not have to take a train by myself from Kobe to Kyoto.  After breakfast we went out into the terminal and I signed up and was able to snag a ticket inside—they had two buses instead of just one, and they must have correctly anticipated the rush because there were about twenty people or so who hopped onto the trip with me. 

Our trip guide was named Hiroko, which is kind of the most adorable name I’ve ever heard.  I kind of love Japanese names—they mean such beautiful things, like Hiroko means broad-minded.  Also, how cute would it be to call a little girl Hiro for short?  Anyway, she talked a little bit about Kyoto while I napped on the bus—Kyoto was about an hour away by bus.

When I woke up we were driving through the streets of Kyoto.  I was initially pretty shocked by the city, because it seemed so huge and modern, while I was expected a quiet, small city that was very old fashioned with the wooden Japanese-style buildings with sweeping roofs and temples sprouted up everywhere.  I guess that was silly to think that Kyoto would have never changed for hundreds of years.  Still, when we got to our first temple, we were excited to get inside.  This temple was Sanjusangen-do, and the unique thing about it is that it’s main hall is filled with 1,001 Senju Kannon-zo, which are golden statues of “thousand-handed” goddesses of mercy.  Standing in front of these statues were these absolutely incredible statues of 28 guardians, which included the wind god, the thunder god, and things like that.  They were done in the greatest art style—almost cartoon, but all were very fearsome.  They were great.  In the center of the hall was Senju Kannon-zazo, a giant seated version of Kannon.  I wish we could have taken more pictures, but we weren’t allowed to—still, it was a magical and almost eerie experience, and made me want to write about gods and dragons and all sorts of things!  At the gift shop I bought a tiny fortune that had a little god charm inside, and the one I pulled at random was the god of fishing and good travels—sounds like a Semester at Sea god if I ever heard one!

Next we were off to Nijo Castle, which is a castle protected by a moat that includes the Ninomaru Palace and also the ruins of the Honmaru Palace, which we got to see.  Here Julie and I didn’t really stick with our tour group and prowled around the Ninomaru castle by ourselves, having a grand adventure with the beautiful walls that were painted.  I especially loved the “nightingale floors” which we designed to be squeaky so that no one could assassinate the shogun successfully by nightfall.  We ate our most terrible box lunch in one of the rooms outside of the castle that was an indoor picnic-souvenir shop room.  Then we went out and explored Honmaru and looked at the gardens that were around, as well as climbing up to one of the corner turrets to see out into Kyoto.  It was pretty neat—we also saw the most horrifying gigantic bee that ever could exist.  It was a good thick three inches long with red sparkly eyes.  D:  Julie and I have discovered that it was a Japanese Giant Hornet, nicknamed the Sparrow Hornet in Japanese, and are the most venomous bee on earth per sting.  D: D: D:

Off we went then to Ryoan-Ji, which was built in 1450.  It is a famous dry zen garden, with a large area of small rocks/sand, and fifteen rocks in this garden.  There are lots of interpretations you can take to view it—some people think that that the sand is an ocean and the rocks are islands, others think it is a river with tigers swimming in it.  My favorite interpretation is that the sand are clouds and the rocks are the mountain peaks that are poking out of the clouds.  We sat and looked at the garden for a while, but to be completely honest I found that kind of boring.  I walked over to the other side of the temple and instead looked at this little shrine under some maple trees, where the ground was covered in moss.  It was a lot more pretty to me.  :D

Lastly on our list was Kinkaku-ji, which of course contains the famous Golden Pavilion through a strolling garden.  I practically had to beat people out of the way in order to get a good picture, it was so crowded, but it was incredibly beautiful to see—the sun was going down at that point and it was glinting off the pavilion, which was really cool.  We threw coins to the roofs of little shrines for good luck and did a little bit of meditation.

Then it was time for Julie and I to head out on our adventure!  The bus was so kind as to drive us out as close as we could get to the Kyoto train station and then we, as well as a couple other people who were also going to be traveling independently.  We passed through a sleepy neighborhood filled with gardens until we finally got to the train station, where the Kyoto tower loomed above us.  Julie and I encountered then some problems when we went up to the Welcome Inn, a hotel reservation service—every room in Kyoto was full!  Julie said that there was no way—there was one room available and it was for us.  We were looking at internet cafes nearby—many internet cafes allow you to sleep inside the café for the night for only twenty dollars or so—when another woman came running up to tell us that ONE ROOM had just opened up in a ryokan—a minimalistic hotel that was only about a two minutes walk away!  Needless to say, we jumped on the opportunity.  We also booked a capsule hotel for our time in Tokyo and were very excited that we were all going to have everything all arranged!

We walked over to our hotel, the Ryokan White Hotel, which was kind of down a shady alley.  We went inside and it was a small little building.  We slipped off our shoes, checked in, and went up to our room on the fourth floor.  It was a small little room with a little desk, a TV, a little stand, and two beds that were mats on the floor, Japanese-style.   We were really excited and flopped all over the place on our mat beds.  The bathroom was even tinier than the SAS bathrooms—just a toilet, sink, and shower that was hooked up to the sink.  I banged my elbows several times. 

Then we decided to head out again!  We went into the Kyoto train station because we were starved at this point and wanted to eat some food, and we found a Chinese place that had lots of vegetarian options.  I got delicious fried noodles and pot stickers, as well as a beer, and had a fun time just people-watching for a little while.  After a while we hopped on bus 206 to go to the Gion district, which is the old district of Kyoto where the Geisha are said to frequent.  We got off the bus at Kiyomizu-Dera, which was a temple that was lit up at night for the autumn festivals.  We followed a HUGE crowd of Japanese people walking up a hill until we saw it—a beam of light jutting out of the sky, a pavilion towering over Kyoto on the top of the hill.  We walked all the way up and began to explore all of the different temple buildings.  There was a sacred water well that we drank from, and another thing that was like a very sword-in-the-stone esque thing where you picked up these metal bars from the ground and then settled them down again.  It was pretty funny because these tiny Japanese girls would struggle to pick them up while me and Julie just dominated—some guy was even like WHAAAAO!  It was pretty silly.  :)  There was also a nighttime viewing of the maple leaves, which was a BIG DEAL for all the Japanese people.  I love those maples but I’d already seen about twenty thousand of them already, so I didn’t need to see them too much. 

So that was pretty neat and it felt pretty authentic to be part of this festival with all the locals, even though we didn’t know a lot of what was going on.  :)  After that we decided to walk down the road because the Gion district was bound to be around there somewhere.  We walked for what seemed like forever, but had a pretty good time just looking around us (we found a menu that said “English menu avairable” and I laughed for ten thousand years).  We went down a sketch alleyway that looked potentially Gion-y, and we saw all these fancy bar areas that had a lot of Japanese business men around and also these beautiful women in long ballgowns.  We were considering the fact that maybe the look of the Geisha has changed, but then again, it might have just been in the area that we were in.  We did see lots of wooden houses that were really old-fashioned and looked very Meiji, so we felt pretty successful even though we didn’t see a traditional Geisha. 

By the time we hopped back on the bus, we were exhausted and because it was the end of the bus line we had to go aaaaall the way around again before we got back to our ryokan.  So that was like an hour but we ended up getting back to the train station not long after midnight, and we went back to our ryokan and just totally crashed out, sleeping very well.  Hilarious story of the night was when we went back and asked for a wake up call at 7:30.  “7:20,” the hotel desk guy responded.  “…Sure,” we said.