Kyoto part 2

Well, I've had substantially less internet access than I thought I would, so this has just gotten out of hand. But I'm putting up several posts in the next few days, to catch up with being in Korea; whether or not I'll be able to put up any more updates after this weekend is up in the air; I'm going to China, and a lot of websites are blocked in China, including this one, as of the last time I checked. There might be some way for me to get around it, we'll see.

Anyway, for now, Kyoto part 2:

So I get up the next day, and take my time a little bit. I’m sooooooooooooo not a morning person. Never have been, and probably never will be. Some how, some way, I’ll find a way to rebel against the morning system of traditional working life. I’ll get back to you on the specific details of how I accomplish that at a later date.

I didn’t have to get up early by almost anyone’s standards; 11am is a pretty posh time to start a tour of a place. But, keep in mind I don’t know how to use most of the public transit in Kyoto; Kyoto is a city with probably somewhere in the vicinity of 3 or 4 train/subway lines, and though these could be useful, my hostel was not located near any of them, ergo, not so useful. I could have rented a bike, but it would still cost some money, and I might not recognize it correctly after parking it and coming back to it later, and taking someone else’s bike is a big no-no ‘round these parts. There are buses, too, but if you don’t speak Japanese, taking a bus is a big pain; this is true of bus systems in any country where you don’t speak the language, of course. The chances of a bus driver having advanced education in a foreign language are fanciful to say the least. I DO have elementary education in Japanese, so if I really wanted to, I could sit down and make out the bus system in any given city in Japan, but, I hate planning, so, I just do my thing the way I want to. Which has thus far entailed a lot of walking.

So I go out and walk towards the Imperial Palace. But I judge from my timing that there’s no way I’d make it in time, if I walk the entire length, so I dash into the nearest subway I can find, and take that to the nearest station. After running out of there, I find myself barely making it in time; you’re supposed to show up 10 minutes before the allotted tour time, but of course that’s just to make sure that stragglers like me show up by the time the tour’s supposed to start, instead of 10 minutes after. Everyone else (and by everyone, I mean easily around 50-70 people) are waiting in a, well, waiting room, when I show up, and right then its announced that the tour is about to start, so everyone stands up and starts pouring out.

The tour gets going, and here are a smattering of pictures from there, with the best recollection that I can muster in regards to the content of each of the pictures.

After this, I felt pretty exhausted. In fact, at one point, the tour guide even asked me if I was okay, apparently I looked like shit, as if I had been hit by a bus and tumbled down a brambled hill or something. I knew I was tired, I didn’t think I looked THAT bad. Anyway, I told her I was fine, just a bit exhausted from the past week of travelling or so, and she seemed to be content with that answer, and assured me that it wouldn’t be too much longer until the tour was over.

By far the funniest part of the tour was the last part, which was a vacant lot. The tour guide made a point of making fun of it, but apparently it used to be a kitchen, and it was kept far away from the rest of the complex to make sure that in the event it caught fire, that fire would be unlikely to spread to the other buildings. For those of you who don’t give much thought to these things, fire is a big frickin’ deal for buildings in most of the world prior to the 1800s at best, and mid 1900s in general, as almost everyone makes their buildings out of some kind of plant parts, whether its wood or thatched roofs or whatever. In fact, the number of times that the Kyoto Imperial Palace burnt down are probably too many to count. In the readings I had in my brochure alone, over a dozen different major burning-down’s are mentioned.

For me, personally, this was sort of interesting to think about. I’ve often bemoaned the destruction that war brings to cultural legacies in different countries, and the wars of the twentieth century in particular have been most spectacularly apocalyptic in that respect; however, it seems this is the norm, rather than the exception, and that it should just be accepted that things must be rebuilt as time goes on; just as the Kyoto emperors were content with living in rebuilt palaces, so too should we be content with walking through rebuilt structures. Authenticity is the by-word of desirability in most travels, but what genuine authenticity implies and begs is up for debate, I think.

After visiting the palace, though, I kinda felt I’d had enough for a bit of city sight traipsing, so I headed back to the hostel, mostly to get some laundry done. While hanging out in the living room area there, I saw Celeste again; we chatted at length, and were joined by a friend of Celeste’s, named Niaya, a girl from America by way of Britain (a multiple year length study in Britain has left her with more than a twinge of a British accent), whereby we had a rooftop conversation as they lit up a couple cigarettes, and shortly decided to head out on the town together.

This went on to be one of my favorite days of the whole trip, for reasons that should be readily apparent.

It was probably around 5pm when we headed out, and the first order of the day was to get some food. Niaya had been to a supposedly decent Ramen place in one part of town, though she didn’t recall the exact location, and I convinced them to walk instead of motor-transit the way there, because the general vicinity of the place wasn’t far from us, not more than a twenty minute or so walk. So after wandering around lost, more or less, we eventually find out it’s on the other side of that river, and make our way in, to have some admittedly tasty ramen, as well as Ramone for me (pronounced Ra-mo-nay, not like the Spanish pronunciation), which is a melon soda quizzically Japanese in its construction. It’s a glass bottle, with a special chamber at the top of the neck stocked with a marble, which you have to push down with a special plunger inside the cap to unseal; after accomplishing this, you have to be semi-careful in the way you try to drink it, or else the marble will stop the flow. Japanese people get a great kick out of watching foreigners attempt this, and though admittedly I’m a total newbie with it, I find that the troubles are a little over-exaggerated, though the second bottle I had did partially end up on my clothes, after a particularly explosive dislodging of the marble.

After ramen & Ramone, we went to a coffee shop just next door, which was actually a combination coffee shop and backpacker’s hostel, where Niaya had stayed in a previous trip to Kyoto about a year ago or so, if I remember correctly.

This place was surprisingly hip and un-Japanese –like. The owner was a total hippy of a Japanese guy, although specifically of the Japanese brand of hippies who look more like Rastafarians (if you can imagine a Japanese Rastafarian) than the American brand of hippy, and whose style more closely emulates that of Rastafarians in general as well. There were a few other people inside the café, and Niaya tried futilely to re-connect with the owner, who had no recollection of her, but was still nevertheless quite hospitable.

Of particular note was an American, Lebanon-born but Huntington Beach, California-raised, and Canadian and Japanese-trained Buddhist monk, a white guy whose English name I don’t recall, though I suspiciously think it might have been as simple as John. His Japanese name, though, was G (or more likely Ji), which he likened to that of gangstas, a comparison unexpected coming from the mouth of a Buddhist monk.

He was an odd character in a lot of ways, carrying a towel in one hand, wrapped in circles about it likely to be more convenient for wiping sweat from his brow, but treated almost as a rosary, as he wrapped and re-wrapped and unwrapped and re-wrapped it countless times over the course of half an hour or more. His voice was hesitant, which he claimed stemmed from a lack of use of the English language over the most recent portion of his life, but which I find likely to be ascribed more to his general nature anyway, as he was a rather meek figure, despite being taller than myself ( I stand at about 6 ft, or 183cm). His eyes betrayed a lack of confidence in himself, though hardened into an intensity when talking about his faith.

He was apparently defying his master by being in a café that night, and had lied to him in regards to his whereabouts for the evening, previously informing his master that he’d be going out for the night with another monk, but was instead hanging out at this Rastafarian café with a cosmopolitan crowd from all over, including the posse that I, at that time anyway, belonged to.

He also had his own e-mail address, a fact that came up in light of a discussion between him and Celeste, as Celeste tried to find out some details in regards to how she could partake in a serious Buddhist retreat. His e-mail address, at that, was something along the lines of duncefactory@yahoo or whatever other email provider.

I don’t know about you guys, but none of this was really what I expected from my first ever close up meeting and conversation with a Buddhist monk. However, Ji (or G, as I like to think of him) insisted that in fact Buddhist monks are mostly rebels.

But eventually, after screwing around with crazy wooden shoes and parasols as well as chatting up unlikely American monks, it was time to move on, and we were in search of a particular nightclub/music venue that was apparently supposed to play host to some reggae bands for the evening.

We got there not long after leaving the café; it was just past 11pm, and though there was a hefty cover fee (something really common in Japan), about 20 dollars, we asked if we could just take a peek to see what we thought before paying; we were informed that since the music for the night was actually finished, that we could go in without paying any cover. Imagine our surprise that things would actually end at 11pm! We went in and had a drink or two, asking around for ideas of where else to go; one guy who seemed to want to impress Niaya agreed to do some fact-finding, but later we realized that he had just sat down and smoked a joint instead, and was a bit embarrassed when we approached him. The consensus of people then was that there’s just not much worth talking about past 11pm, on a week day.

We gave up, and high tailed it out of there, whereupon Niaya was called by a Japanese friend, whose name also escapes me at the moment. Turns out he had just got off work from a nearby swanky bar called Atlantis (or Atorantisu in Japanese) and wanted to hang out a bit. We met up, and he led us to a nearby bar that I guess he knew well enough, and knew the owner of or something; when we got there, there was a couple other gaijin hanging out in the only two sofas there, and the owner kicked them out of the sofas to make room for the four of us. That was treatment I’m not exactly accustomed to, or comfortable with, but the way it goes, apparently. We sat there for probably around an hour, all talking and drinking. Other that those two other gaijin, we were the only patrons, so perhaps Kyoto really does shut down early at night, or we just have terrible luck.

Soon we parted ways with Niaya's Japanese friend, who took this picture of Niaya, Celeste, and I:

Once we left there, Celeste wanted to make a final trip through one of the geisha district areas, hoping to score a glimpse late at night. I figured it was past their bedtime, as it was close to 1am by this point, but we went anyway; we didn’t see any, but that was alright. So we agreed to call it a night, and headed back to our respective lodgings again; this night, Celeste actually moved to another room, one she specifically booked with Niaya, so, I had the pleasure of waking up three strangers when I came back to my room and bumped my way around to get to my bed. Seems hostellers mostly like going to bed early and getting up late, in Japan, anyway. That’s crazy talk, if you ask me, but hey, there you have it.

Somewhere along the way, Niaya and Celeste had mentioned that they were going to Osaka the next day, to go to a music festival called Summer Sonic, which is a pretty big deal music festival in Japan, with tons of acts, both Japanese, Pan-Asian, and Western (featuring big names like Linkin Park, Beyonce, Fallout Boy, and a bunch of other bands I actually care about, as opposed to those three). Osaka was west of our present location, and I didn’t have any particular plan for the next several days, so I figured Osaka was as good as any other place for my purposes, and we made a tentative agreement to all head in the same direction, and though I wouldn’t be able to join them at the festival (they got hooked up with free tickets, and its an expensive show, around 140 dollars a day), we’d maybe find time afterwards, because it ended pretty early in the evening, around 10pm.

But my oh my, that’s not really what happened. That story, however, will be saved for the next post. Stay tuned!