Road Trip Diaries

We had breakfast in the same bakery cafe as yesterday, and took the same subway route to Shin-Osaka. We had all the ingredients of a “morning set” deal at the bakery, so they forced a boiled egg on us, which I enjoyed.

Cold boiled eggs are quite common — they even sell them individually wrapped in convenience stores. They are pure white. Apparently, eggs in Britain used to be white, until a meme spread that brown eggs were more “natural”, and now you can only get white eggs in farm shops and Harrods.

After one stop on the shinkansen, we were in Kyoto. I immediately made an invalid mapreading assumption, which we realised after half an hour of determined trudging in the wrong direction.

To recover, we braved Kyoto’s bus system. This was largely a matter of arbitrarily spotting a bus mentioned in the guide book, and hopping on the next one to pass, and was only obstructed by a bus official trying (and failing) to be helpful. An amused local with better English helped instead.

We had a detailed plan, which involved following a walking route from Lonely Planet, taking in several temples, picking up bento on the way, and eating in a park.

The first temple was Kiyomizu-dera.

We asked a helpful looking man with a broom where Tainai-meguri was — another guidebook recommendation. This literally means “the womb of Buddha”, and I’m honestly not sure whether it’s a real object of worship or a means of extracting cash from foolish gaijin. 100 yen lets you down some steps beneath the main temple. The walls are black, and there is no light. The passage turns several times, to block out the light even more. Eventually we came upon a largeish stone with a symbol carved into it. It was mounted on bearings, so it could be rotated freely. Turn the stone; make a wish; emerge blinking into the light, wondering what the hell that was meant to be.

The throngs of tourists made the rest of the temple unattractive, impressive though the buildings were. We left, along the bustling but attractive street leading away from the temple.

Lunchtime was approaching, and we knew that a park was imminent. We passed by dozens of restaurants while looking out for bento. We skipped several temples, because we didn’t want to rush through them on empty stomachs. In these less than ideal conditions, we strode through some of Kyoto’s most attractive and historic cobbled streets.

We paused for some street food: small portions of yakitori chicken.

… but that wasn’t lunch. Before we knew it, we were at the park, bentoless. We said we’d get bento at the next place we saw, and come back — for it was a nice park.

Everywhere we’ve been in Japan, there has been food available. Suddenly we were upon the only place we’ve experienced where there was none. A huge torii led us to the museum district: still no food.

Three o’clock, and we’d made it to downtown Kyoto. Debbie was worried that if we had a full lunch now, we wouldn’t be hungry for our dinner. We settled for a bakery. Actually this worked out OK — we tasted a unique Japanese twist on western dishes: croissant based hot dogs.

… and cake.

Here, in a modern shopping arcade, I think we experienced a more real aspect of Kyoto than the large temples that draw the tourist mobs: as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, a space that you might expect to be occupied by a shoe shop, is instead occupied by a cluster of shrines.

In our hours of traipsing around Kyoto, we saw dozens of shrines, in all sizes — from the size of a phone box to the size of a large secondary school.

We walked towards Kyoto station. past one last shrine: the huge Higashi Hongan-ji.

The enormous main temple was wrapped in a casement for maintenance. It looked like a warehouse. Oh well; the outbuildings were pretty. Inside, as well as an image of the Cosmic Buddha, there was a huge coil of rope made from human hair — apparently hair donated by well wishers in the 1880s, used to hoist beams for reconstruction.

We returned to the train station, and journeyed back to Osaka.

I have become a fan of the various train lines’ theme tunes. The Hikari between Tokyo and Okayama has a theme tune that sounds like the “five gold rings” line from the twelve days of Christmas. The subway line from Namba to Shin-Osaka sounds like the Sheila’s Wheels advert. Debbie is hoping to find the Tokyo Yamamote line theme tune as a ringtone. They are reassuring: you know you’re on the right line once you’ve learned the tunes.

Before going to our hotel, we browsed through our local electronics superstore: Bic Camera. It had a fun toy floor. In the board games section, we saw Capcom’s Japanese version of Settlers of Catan, which has different artwork to the original: tempting but frivolous since we already own Catan. There was also a Japanese edition of Ticket to Ride. This was also tempting, but the artwork was not different, and we spotted that kana on the cards would be a significant obstacle to play for most of our friends and family.

I was hoping to find a fun RolleiFlex mini (a slightly overpriced toy digital camera), but could only find its full sized non-toy prototype, for 300,000 yen (US$3,000).

Yakuta hour came and went.

We went out for dinner. A stroll around the block brought us to a yakitori restaurant, which Debbie deemed acceptable. We ordered a large plate of mixed yakitori and some rice. Alas, Debbie couldn’t really face most of it: liver, mussels, chicken skin etc.

We were in a funny state of hunger when we left. Not hungry enough to try and get dinner again, not sated enough to go to bed without eating more.

To put off thinking about it, we went into an amusement arcade. I had a go at a fantasy themed vertical 2D shooter: it can’t be very popular, because I had the third highest score of the day. New coin-op cabinets have very large screens, but traditional definition. I think the screen needs to be smaller, or further away, or high-def.

Exploring deeper into the arcade, we found flashy variations on the old penny waterfalls principle. It used tokens instead of real money, and I couldn’t resist buying 1,000 yen’s worth to share with Debbie, and give it a go. This lasted a surprisingly long time (reminding me of the Bill Bryson anecdote, where he sees an old lady win a fruit machine jack<!– x –>pot in Las Vegas: “poor woman, it’s going to take her forever to put that all back in”).

The principle is the same, but there is a video screen in the centre. Mine was themed on Rockman. If your coin dropped in certain places, it would move Rockman along a path of squares. Some squares triggered features, sometimes causing the machine to contribute extra coins, usually resulting in a payout. At one point I reached the goal, causing 60 coins to drop into the game. Nonetheless, we eventually managed to get rid of all our tokens.

From somewhere in the arcade, “Land of Hope and Glory” was playing. It turned out that this was what happened when a player at one of the elaborate multi-player penny waterfall machines won a jack<!– x –>pot.

Some video games had sockets enabling players to bring their own Playstation controllers instead of using the joysticks provided, and many players were doing just that.

Leaving, I suggested to Debbie that one thing we hadn’t done during this holiday — and something we used to make a point of doing from time to time in America — was buy a load of junk food from a convenience store and treat is as our dinner in the hotel room. This solved our food dilemma.

• Chip Star: much like Pringles
• Jagarico: reconstiuted root vegetable tubes. We had potato and carrot flavour, and plain potato flavour
• Friend Bakery: chocolate biscuits; nice.
• Pakitz: Don’t know yet: my reward for finishing this diary entry
• Fish shaped hot pastry thing: somewhat Japanese. It contains the sweet paste traditional in Kansai regional sweets.

Oh, and Yellowtail Australian Shiraz!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Japan 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.