Listen to the Rain

Late night, late morning, and the rain that had been predicted nearly every day in the weather report finally arrived. schoolpsychnerd went out with xoDrVenture to fetch breakfast, and then came back, ate, and we left just under the buzzer to allow the hotel staff to clean our room.

Everyone else wanted to go over to Arashiyama on the west side of Kyoto, their various original plans having been scuppered by the rain. They decided this when we were already on the bus toward Ginkakuji, though, so we stayed on and alighted in northeastern Kyoto in a light rain. We walked hand-in-hand for about five minutes through houses and small shops and, next to a children's park made of dirt with a single swing and slide, we found the entrance to Hōnen-in.



I read about Hōnen-in this morning, and while the website I read said the central building was only open for two weeks a year, in April and November, it also said that the grounds had a lovely moss covering and were little-visited. Both of those sounded like huge bonuses, so I asked schoolpsychnerd about it and she was all in favor. And it was exactly as advertised. I did have to wait for a couple other tourists to move out of the way to take that picture, but with the rain and Hōnen-in not really being famous for anything specific, we had it mostly to ourselves.

We couldn't go into the main hall, but it didn't matter. The advertised moss was there, as was a lovely fish pond, a few outbuildings, a stone stupa, and a statue tucked into a corner:



After a few minutes' wandering around, we went back down toward the park and further north, where we realized we were on the 哲学の道 (Tetsugaku no Michi, "Philosopher's Walk"), which we've walked before the last time we were in Kyoto when my parents came to visit. After a brief diversion over to Anraku-ji only to find it was closed, we walked about five minutes north to the end of the road and Ginkakuji.

Ginkakuji is my favorite temple in Kyoto, but I think a lot of that has to do with my introduction to it. The first time we went, it was the end of December close to the new year, and almost no one was there other than us. The grounds were deserted other than one man raking the sand and us.

That was not the case here. The road from the Philosopher's Walk was absolutely packed full of people and the shrine was the same. It was still beautiful, but it fell victim to the typical problem with tourism--you want places to be easily accessible but no one to be there except you. Still, when I could ignore the people around, it was lovely.



The name means "Silver Pavilion" to match with Kinkakuji's "Golden Pavilion," but there's no actual silver on the buildings. The story is that they planned to cover it with silver but never got around to it, but no one really knows. I don't really care much for the buildings anyway. It's the gardens that I love.

I also got this picture of the grounds and the city.



On the way down, we popped into the gift shop. While we were tempted by the Kitty-chan tea mugs, we eventually decided not to get them, but did go for matcha and a sweet, the real reason we had entered in the first place. The sweets were soybean flour cakes formed in the shape of the mon of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who ordered its construction. It was good--better than the matcha I can make, but not so much better than I feel like making matcha is a waste of time for me. I just need more practice, and I can do it.

After that, we took the bus back toward Kyoto Station but got off at Gion for lunch. Unfortunately, it was already 2:30 p.m. when we arrived and most places were closed or closing, and the places that weren't were serving noodles that I didn't want. We found one compromise place that had duck udon, but when we got inside, the duck udon was scratched out, so we left. We were running out of patience when schoolpsychnerd found a restaurant called Izumoya, where we got a seat upstairs overlooking the Kamogawa. ¥2000 set with dashimaki, miso soup, pickles, rice, sashimi, tofu, tempura, seaweed salad, salt mackerel...it was delicious. That link had some bad reviews, but I'm really happy we went.



Next was the kanji museum, which I had seen a few days ago and wanted to go to for a while. Right after entering we saw a video about the origin of kanji in China from ideographic representation to the more stylized images in use currently, which made the point that emoji are very similar to the origin of kanji. And just outside was a display that demonstrated it the progression of kanji from ancient to modern:



After that was a display where you could write the syllables of your name and see what kanji were used to derive the hiragana and katakana to pronounce it. While doing the katakana, two women noticed our writing and we got into a brief chat with them about how we used to teach English in Hiroshima and were from Chicago, and it turned out that one of them was an exchange student in Detroit! She said she had a lot of fun, but it was extremely cold, which, well, can't argue with that.

We couldn't read a lot of the information there and the kanji library was definitely beyond our ability, so we took a quick look into the gift shop and then left to get some anmitsu and, after that, to look at kanzashi for schoolpsychnerd's hair. After a bit of browsing, she found a black and green one and then we took the bus back to Kyoto Station, browsed around the shops there, and then headed back to the room to rest a bit before dinner.

Due to a miscommunication, we ended up not meeting up for dinner, so four people went to Chojiro again and, due to long lines, schoolpsychnerd, another friend, and I took the bus to Gion and found a hole-in-the-walk yakitori place called Torin (鳥ん). No pictures of the inside because they requested no photos, but I did take this picture of the outside:



There was a ¥300 table,charge and one-drink minimum order, so initially I was set to hate the place. But they won me over with the food. I ordered the set meal and got a hamburg (ハンバーグ, more like Salisbury steak than hamburger) with egg, salad, chicken skin appetizer, ice cream, and three yakitori skewers. The yakitori was excellent. Crunchy on the outside, juicy on the inside, flavorful without being overwhelming, just fantastic. The table charge was actually worth it. And with only twelve seats in the place, I can kind of see why they charge it.

We left and met up with the others, bought some conbini sake and umeshu, and headed back to aaron.hosek's Air BnB to chat. That lasted about an hour before schoolpsychnerd and said friend were falling asleep, so the rest of us said our goodbyes and conducted a Pokéwalk back to our respective places of rest.

I evolved an イーブイ into シャワーズ, and I learned that Showers is called "Vaporeon" in English.

Steps taken: 18226

A couple days ago, schoolpsychnerd and I took a bit of time to head down to Iwakuni for the Kintaikyou Matsuri. For those who don't know, 錦帯橋 is a famous bridge that's built in a series of arches over the river, and every spring, Iwakuni has as festival there that, in addition to the standard things you find at Japanese festivals, reenacts the processional of a daimyō returning home. That part was pretty neat, though we didn't stay very long to see much because it was extremely sunny out and neither of us had brought sunscreen.

There were a couple things of interest, though, other than pretty pictures of the bridge. The first was that they had set up kind of a flea market. Now, pretty much every Japanese festival has bunches of 屋台 (yatai, "[food] carts") all over the place, and usually they all look the same from festival to festival (which makes me wonder if there's some standard company that supplies them), but I've never seen much else for sale. This had all kinds of things--pottery, jewelry, clothing, even things like plants and farm tools. If we weren't leaving in a few months and if I didn't think most generic decorations not that great (I really like the spartan nature of traditional Japanese home), we might have bought something. But, we are and I do, so we didn't.

The second thing was that when we were walking through the park named after the town's founder, we heard a band playing a Sousa march. Since Iwakuni has an American military base, both schoolpsychnerd and I had the same thought at the same time, but we were wrong. It was a local high school's brass band.

So, last week I missed basically everything that happened on the internets because my parents were in town. If you don't remember my Kyōto entry, then I suggest you reference it again because we went all the same places. :-p The only difference was that this time, it was hot and humid instead of cold, and we walked everywhere.

After Kyōto, we made a brief stop in Himeji to see Himeji-jō, which was tragically cut short when my mother twisted her ankle and fainted (probably from a combination of shock, the heat and dehydration. One roll for breakfast and ice cream for lunch does not constitute a balanced diet no matter how healthy your dinner is, Mom!). I ended up running up 6 or 7 flights of stairs to get a guard and explain the situation, and as a minor benefit I will never forget the word for "to faint, collapse" now. She was okay--it was only twisted, not sprained or broken--but we cut our visit short and headed home to get some rest schoolpsychnerd and I are probably going to take a day trip and go back in September when we have a 5-day weekend. It's only 1.5 hours or so by shinkansen from Hiroshima, so that's easily doable in a day (if expensive).

The day after that we rested to give my mother's ankle time to heal, and on Friday we went to Hirata-san's (our Japanese-tutor) house for lunch. Before lunch, her husband, who is a Buddhist priest, showed us around the temple and demonstrated a sutra for us, which was really neat. He has a good chanting voice--it sounded a bit like throat-singing, if you've ever heard that. The meal was quite good, there was much exchanging of omiyage, and then we went off to Miyajima, where we spent the night in a ryokan. Not a small one--those are all super expensive, and would have been booked anyway--but it was still neat. The food was delicious, and it was modernized enough to have air conditioning, which made sleeping on a futon not so bad.

The next day we looked around Miyajima (note that despite the wikipedia article title, all the signs to get there say "Miyajima," even in Japanese). We didn't actually go to the shrine, partially because people had shrine fatigue after Kyōto , but we did climb Mt. Misen. My father and I did it the hard way, and schoolpsychnerd and my mother took the ropeway up. I didn't feel especially holy afterwards, though. 95% humidity meant I felt more just hot and sticky. After riding down the mountain the easy way, we looked around town for a bit (and schoolpsychnerd and I had a delicious lunch of anago, the local specialty), we went back to Chiyoda.

Then on Sunday, they looked around Hiroshima, and on Monday they headed home. schoolpsychnerd and I were going to stay in the city afterwards, but we were incredibly tired so we just went home.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the bombing, and I think I'm going to the ceremony. There's going to be statements by hibakusha with accompanying English translation, which will be really neat to hear. The actual remembrance is too early for me (and the candles on the river are probably too late), but I can go for the statements at least.