Tokyo Trip: Day05
From www.ChopStork.com
Day Five (12/28/04)
Today A.J. and DP left for Kyoto where they'll be spending the night. I'm too poor to go to Kyoto. So instead of reading a BakaGaijin bakagaijin's account of his day in Japan you get to read about mine.
I woke up a little past noon, just in time for some lunch. After lunch I was going to go back to sleep, but instead was dragged along by mom to go shopping at this place called Jusco. I suppose this place is kind of like the Walmart of Tokyo, since they sell all kinds of stuff and it's relatively cheap. The whole point of me going was to buy a winter coat since I don't have one and it's winter. They didn't have anything I liked, so to make the most of my outing I bought a razor to shave with since I left the charger to my electric razor at home in Virginia. After I took about 10 minutes to pick out a razor that I will probably use twice we went downstairs where the grocery store part of Jusco is. The biggest difference between a Japanese grocery store and an American one has to be that in Japan the shopping carts have four wheel steering. Stuck in a tight corner? Not a problem. Just swing the back end around. Try that at your local Piggly Wiggly.
After our trip to Jusco I surfed the intArw3b for a couple hours before my parents and I went to Tokyo station to check out the Tokyo Millenario. I have no idea what the idea behind it is, who organizes it, or what Millenario is supposed to mean, but this is what it looked like:
http://chaserchaser.com/vids/millenario1.jpg
http://chaserchaser.com/vids/millenario2.jpg
Next was dinner. After parking our car illegally we stopped by a pet store for no apparent reason. Inside said pet store there was a little terrier running around amongst the incredibly overpriced dog furniture. There were also a few dogs for sale, including a $2800 Lab and a $4000 long haired Chihuahua.
After our brief detour we made our way to Moti, an Indian restaurant. I've been going to this place for years, and it is by far the best Indian restaurant I've been to. I mean, they have pasties as an appetizer. How can you beat that?
-Hampton
- Day Five from the Kyoto team*
So AJ and I decided to go to Kyoto for 2 days. First a little history/geography of Kyoto. Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan. Then the emperor and the Shogun had a little falling out. The shogun left Kyoto and lived in Tokyo, to get away from the Emporeror, and took the power with him. Kyoto is a beautiful city about a 2.5 hour Shinkansen (bullet train) ride or a 6 hour drive to the south east of Tokyo. It's surrounded on all but the south side by mountains. It has tons of temples and castles in it, which are incredibly old. Plus a lot of them are nestled up in the mountains so you get some terrific views (as well as a hell of a work out to get there). But we'll get into more details later, back to our story.
AJ's dad dropped AJ and myself at Tokyo station. As Hampton has already noted in his recount of day 5, he can't party with the big boys, and decided to stay at home because he was scared. So he left myself and AJ, who can susprisingly read very little japanese, to fend for ourselves. First we purchased our Shinkansen passes for 13000 yen. Thats around $130 bucks at the current exchange rate. Did I mention that that was for one way? Yeah, Japan is not exactly inexpensive. The train stations in Japan are an amazing model of efficiency. From the moment we purchased the ticket until the train was leaving the station was less than 8 minutes. And we are talking about a train that goes over 150 miles per hour. Take a look at how areodynamic these bad boys are. There is a reason their nickname is the bullet train. Plus if we had missed that train there was another one coming 10 minutes later. That makes Cal Train look like a childrens' toy. Plus can you get a bento box on the Cal train? I don't think so. After about 2 and 1/2 hours we were at the Kyoto station. Kyoto Station is massive and super modern. Its contemperary architecture is cool, and lets a light of light in. Very Cool.
AJ and I walked a couple of blocks west to our hotel, the APA which stand for "Always Pleasant Amenity," (Engrish) and dropped off our backpacks. Then it was off to site see. We took the subway to Nijo Castle. But first we decided to eat some real Kyoto food in one of the back alleys of a nieghborhood. We found a tiny hole in the wall restaurant with about 4 tables in it. There were some minor technical issues when AJ couldn't read the menu very well. But lets be honest, it was ten times better than I can. So he recognized udon noodles. So that's what we had. You'll notice they might want to clean the fish tank next to AJ, it was pretty green. And now it's time for some toilet humor.
A.J.: That means its my turn. So DP says he has to pee. I did too. Being the good friend that I am, I volunteered to go first and find out where it was. It was off in the back, behind the kitchen somewhere. Nice, it's Japanese style. Thank god I only have to pee. And can pee standing. Oooo, look, I better tell DP which way to flush before he uses it. Except I got back to the table and forgot. Eh, he'll figure it out. Meanwhile, over the hole...
DP: After using the facilities I looked at the handle to flush. Here is the test fellow readers. If you had just taken a number 1 which way would you turn it? Using my extensive knowledge of Kanji, I knew that to the right was the character "big". I knew to turn the other way. I passed the test. All my hardwork of learning Kanji was paying off. It turns out AJ had know all this was going to happen when he went, but instead of warning me he took pictures for chopstork. Pretty good friend huh?
Then we were off to the Castle. As I have mentioned before, in Japan, New Years is a pretty big holiday. Therefore before taking a $130 train ride to Kyoto one way, I highly recommend future travelers to check and make sure everything is open. So obviously Nijo Castle was closed until the 2nd. But here is a picture of the closed sign. Pretty sweet huh? The thing about the castles in Japan that is cool is they all are really well fortified to keep out the intruder's army. And while this makes the castles cool intellectually and architecturally, it also makes them really hard to sneak into. AJ and I were not willing to swim the moat and climb up the 15 ft stone walls to see the interior. At this point we were getting concerned because if Nijo Castle was closed that meant the Emperor's palace was probably not going to be open either. So we hoofed it the 15 blocks north east to find out.
There was some good news and bad news. The bad news was the Emporer's castle was closed. This didn't really make sense since all the signs said closed from the 29th to the 5th and today was the 28th, but whatever. The good news was the gigantic grounds/gardens that surround the palace were open. These grounds were massive. We approached the castle from the south, and we could see it, but no matter how much we walked it didn't seem like we were getting any closer. Finally we did make it to the palace. I also want to add that there are actually two palaces right next to each other. In the center of the grounds is the current Emperor's palace, and to the South East of it is the retired Emporer's palace. Apparently there were some more civilized power transistions here than in Europe, where everyone killed everyone else to ascend to the throne. On a side note both palaces were really nice from the outside. Which furthers my theory which I've hypothosised on previous travels to other countries: "It's good to be King." Anyways AJ and I had a lot to see and only two partial days to see it in, so we were off to the next sight, the temples on the east side of town, in the mountains.
The original plan was to visit Kiyomizu-Dera Temple but the subway doesn’t get very close. The Kyoto subway is pretty straight forward, there is one North-South line, and one East-West line and you can transfer at the center station. So we took the subway south, transferred and took the other subway to the second to last stop east called Higashiyama-Sanjo Station. Then we started walking south. It turned out to be a super nice walk. We walked past Maruyama Park, and saw Chion-in temple. We couldn’t see the temple itself because they were closing for the day, but we got to see the gate called Sanmon (literally means 3rd gate) The gate was huge. The guidebook stated that it is the largest gate in Japan. We believe it. We continued to walk south through Higashiyama (eastern mountains). The roads here were steep, narrow and paved with stones. They were barely wide enough for one car. However on all the roads they painted a white line about 2 feet from the edge to denote the “sidewalk”. It was pretty funny. All the houses and shops on both sides of the road were traditional architecture it was really picturesque. AJ and I decided it would be a pretty good place to bring a chick. But unfortunately we were stuck with each other at this point. It was getting dark, so it was pretty clear that Kiyomizu-Dera would have to wait until tomorrow.
We decided to check out Gion for dinner. Gion is a little bit south east of the main downtown and is famous for being the Geisha quarter. Now contrary to [[BakaGaijin Baka Gaijin] common belief Giesha are not prostitutes. They are companions for men and are trained in a number of skills including the art of conversation, dance, traditional dress and makeup, tea ceremony’s etc. If you throw in serving beer it’s pretty much anything a guy could want in a girl. Unfortunately they are out of our price range. We did however see one after dinner. We apologize for the blurriness but it had to be a stealth picture. Back to Gion and dinner. There is a tiny stream/canal running through the center of Gion, with shops on both sides. It was a super cool area. AJ took about an hour trying to photograph a crane that was standing in the stream, but since it was pitch black it was pretty futile. We walked around for awhile trying to find a cheap place to eat. We finally decided on a yakitori place across the street from the canal. It was definitely a mom and pop shop with only 2 tables inside and about 4 seats at the bar. We had some very serious discussions over some chicken shishkabobs. 5 Asahi’s (extra dry) and 3 hours later we decided it was time to find our way back to the hotel. We think there was a Geisha in training called Maiko sitting next to us at the restaurant because she looked young and was in a full kimono, and old school hair style, but you ("you" = white people) never know. We took the subway back to our place and checked in.
There were a couple differences between this hotel room and a standard American room. The first was it was a lot smaller. It wasn’t necessary cramped, but there wasn’t a lot of wasted space. Our first challenge was trying to turn on the lights. After about 10 minutes of flipping switches and discussing if a fuse had blown, we realized you needed to put the door key in the light switch to get anything to work. But most importantly the beer vending machine was literally right across the hall from our room. I can see why Japanese businessmen get so much work done. But the crème de la crème of the day was figuring out the bidet. Frankly after seeing the water shoot out and hit the ceiling, I’m afraid to ever try one. But I guess, I’m just a dirty American. We went to bed knowing we were going to have to walk even more miles tomorrow.
-DP
Those of you with whom I visited Seattle with will be surprised to know that at the beginning of day 5 in Japan, I had yet to have a defecative emergencyAjNote1 *. But on the way to find dinner, it began. At some temple with a giant head, I looked for a toilet. And of course, it was Japanese style. This time I had to do more than pee. Once I got over that I'd have to squat, I discovered there was no paper. That I couldn't get over, so we continued towards town and came across an am/pm store, where we bought some pocket size tissue. Purpose #1, wipe DP's nose; he has a cold. Purpose #2, wipe A.J.'s butt; he has irritable bowels sometimes. Unfortunately, they didn't have a toilet at this convenience store (not very convenient). But the girl at the counter was nice enough to tell me that the store down the street has one. So we went a couple blocks down the road, and I barely made it.
My Kyoto Lesson #1: Japanese are nicer than Americans; what U.S. 7/11 clerk would volunteer such pertinent information?
On our way back to the hotel after dinner and beer, the bowels struck again. No worries, the subway station has toilets (BART and Metro suck... for not having toilets, and they just suck anyway). I had to prepare myself for squattage again. And again, no TP. But this time I was armed with four packs of kleenex. Apparently, that's the norm, as the trash can was full of empty TP packs. I did not want miss, so I invested a couple seconds getting the right foot placement and finding my target. During the transaction, I found myself holding on to a bar in front of me to prevent from falling backward. Eventually lactic acid buildup kicked in in my legs. Oh, the pain. Luckily the transaction was completed. Wiping involved a complex choreography of transferring kleenex from my bag on the left to my wiping hand (right), all the time keeping a firm grip on the bar. Difficult, but I succeeded. It is clear to me now that my jetrug has subsided (see Day One).
Kyoto Lesson #2: Squatting is hard on the legs ...and... hadlebars are good.
Oh yeah, we also saw lots of beer vending machines in Kyoto: beer vending machine, beer vending machine, beer vending maching, beer vending machine. Total beer vending machines found in Tokyo this trip: ZERO.
Kyoto Lesson #3: They have more beer vending machines in Kyoto. Kyoto might be cooler.
-A.J.
