Saturday morning it was time to end our stay in Kyoto and move on to our first stay with Friendship Force in the town of Nara.  After one last 7-11 breakfast (black pepper fried chicken, rice ball with egg, latte), Margaret and I took a short walk on the path that runs along a stream right next to our hotel.  We’ve seen paths like this throughout the city, making it a wonderful place for running or biking.  We enjoyed watching all the locals walking their perfectly manicured dogs along the path.

After that we headed to the station.  Two of our Nara hosts, Keiko and Kazumi, were kind enough to take the train down to meet us in Kyoto, presumably to ensure that we didn’t get lost on the way.  This was just as well, because I think we may well have done something wrong if waiting for the train ourselves.  First off, when our train arrived, the doors opened on the opposite side (next platform over) to let off the passengers.  On my own, I would have probably been frantically running around the train trying to get on.  But no, this was just an excellent Japanese system that avoided collisions between outgoing and

incoming passengers.  (Not that there would have likely been collisions anyway.  For both buses and trains, the Japanese line up neatly in a straight line while waiting to get on.)  Also, there was a delay before the doors on our side opened.  During that time, we saw a train attendant go through and spin around all the seats on the train, so that passengers would face forward.  Then a man came through with a vaccuum cleaner.  Only once the train was completely clean and ready did the doors open.

We’d gotten onto the platform by scanning our credit cards at the turnstile, as instructed by Kei and Kazumi– then grabbed a group of seats together.  After we got onto the train, there was a series of announcements indicating that on this train, you needed both a reservation and a ticket to ride, and if you didn’t have a reservation, you must exit the train immediately.  Again, on our own we probably would have panicked at this point, but Kei and Kuzomi seemed unmoved, so we stayed put.  No one ever checked our tickets, so I’m not actually sure if we somehow had a reservation, or if we were being scofflaws.

After a short train journey to Nara, we arrived and met our hosts, who brought us to a welcome lunch at a nearby restaurant.  It’s hard to capture how kind and welcoming everyone has been.  We’ve been fed, made comfortable, and entertained in every way.  Most of the group is older people, and many of them didn’t start learning English until they were in their fifties or older — but by practicing diligently through weekly lessons and conversation groups, they’ve become more fluent that I would have though possible.  They have so much energy, even those that are in their 80s.  I think of them like hummingbirds — beautiful, dainty, and in constant motion.  (We Americans are more like Golden Retriever puppies —we mean well and try to please, but tend to bumble around and knock things over )

We’re getting to try lots of interesting food, even if we often don’t know what it is.  Our welcome lunch today featured several different dishes, from miso soup to steamed egg to a kind of salad with rice, raw tuna, vegetables, and salmon roe.  Some things are a challenge to eat with chopsticks, but I surreptitiously watch our Japanese hosts to see how they approach it.

After lunch we went back to our individual home stay homes to settle in.  My host Nobuko and her husband Yoshio have a lovely home in a quiet residential neighborhood.  Margaret and her host, Kazumi, came by for coffee and conversation, and two other members who live nearby stopped by as well.  Yoshio

loves American music from the seventies (the Eagles are his favorite), and eventually showed us his hobby area.  We climbed a ladder up into a loft, which was full of speakers, record players, records, and other sound equipment.  Yoshio builds many of his own speakers and loves to come up here to listen to music.

Dinner was a delicious Japanese curry — similar to, but a little different from, curries that I’ve had at home.  They brought out sake for me to try as well, and presented me with gifts from Japan.  (They seemed to enjoy the maple sugar candy that we’d brought from the US, but it’s possible they were just being polite — they don’t seem to eat a lot of sweets here.)  Then, it was time for an early bedtime after a tiring day.

Today we planned a day-long tour to get the most our of our last day in Kyoto.  We had to catch the 7:20am shuttle from our hotel to Kyoto Station to meet our tour guide, so Margaret and I had to get out to the 7-11 pretty early.  We found the selection to be even better.  Today for breakfast I had Japanese-style spicy fried chicken and an egg roll.  Margaret had some salmon sushi.  Once again, a quality breakfast.

The tour, which was just for our group, covered several sights around Kyoto that it would have been hard to get to on our own.  The first stop had us heading up into the mountains that ring the city, to visit the Buddhist Kiyomizu-dera Temple.  It features a huge terrace built out of the mountainside, constructed entirely without nails.  The views from the terrace, looking out over the forest and the city beyond, were beautiful.  To enter the viewing area for the temple itself, we had to remove our shoes and purify ourselves by washing our hands.  We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the temple itself, but everything was very ornate and impeccably maintained.  Our guide Emiko taught us how to throw a coin offering, then perform the correct series of bows and claps while making a wish.  (Reflecting on how things are going in the US right now, I think many of us shared a similar wish.)  Here we also saw what was to be a constant for the day: huge crowds of tourists.  Much like Florence, we were surrounded by people from all over the world come to see the sights of Kyoto.

Our next stop was a Shinto shrine, Fushimi Inari-taisha.  It features ten thousand red torii gates that have been erected along a path that winds up and down a small mountain.  (Our guide told us that long ago, a businessman who was struggling built the first gate as an offering, and his business then succeeded.  Since then, thousands of businesses have constructed their own gates.)  You can walk through the gates and see the names of those that constructed them. Most were in Japanese characters, but we saw a few more modern company names sprinkled in.  Here and there we saw gates that were falling into disrepair, and were wondering what effect that had on the luck of the business that had built them.

We then went to a restaurant by the river for a buffet lunch.  Many of us ate way too much in an effort to taste everything.  In many cases I wasn’t sure what I was eating, but most of the time it was very good.  The huge restaurant, as well as all the sights we saw, were mobbed with crowds of schoolchildren in uniforms, visiting on field trips.

From the restaurant we walked to the nearby Tenryuji Temple.  The best part of this area was the beautifully landscaped gardens.  The attention to detail was stunning.  We saw several gardeners working on different patches of land, literally pulling out blades of grass one at a time in order to create the perfect effect.  Judy, Margaret, and I spent a fair amount of time wandering the various paths around a pond and across a hillside, even though by then it was raining.  The many paths of the garden, and the rain, also allowed us to escape the crowds for a bit!

Next up was maybe my favorite part of the day — the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest.  Walking up the path felt like entering a tunnel, with densely-packed, ramrod-straight bamboo trees surrounding us, the background a constant whisper of rustling leaves far above.  I would have loved to walk through here alone, but alas, many others clearly felt the same way.

Our final stop was one more temple — the Kinkakuji Temple, known as the Golden Pavilion.  This temple is covered in gold-plating, and shines out dramatically behind a large pond.  We weren’t able to go inside, but the grounds around the temple again were stunningly beautiful and meticulously cared for.

By this time we were pretty wet and very tired, so we unanimously decided to skip the souvenir shop that was supposed to be our last stop of the day.  In exchange, we were able to negotiate a drop-off at our hotel, rather than at the Kyoto station.  This was a great relief to everyone, as we were ready for a quick dinner and bed.  We found our quick dinner at a nearby ramen restaurant — very small and casual, but delicous.  Large bowls of ramen cost about $5!

So I know I just got done writing about our week in Italy, but I’m now in Japan.  Due to poor planning and the fact that our school’s “April” break stretched ridiculously to 5/4, I had about 26 hours between getting home from the first trip and leaving for the airport (again) for the second one.

This time I’m traveling with a group I recently joined

called Friendship Force.  It’s a sort of travel exchange program, and I’m here in Japan with nine other members of the NH Seacoast chapter, and two ladies from Florida.  We’ll be hosted by Japanese clubs in Nara and Tokyo, but we planned a three-day pre-trip to see Kyoto first.  So for the moment, we’re regular tourists here.  I’m rooming with my new friend Margaret, retired librarian of Moharimet School.

Our trip out involved a 15-hour flight to Hong Kong (over the North Pole!) and then a four-hour flight to Osaka.  We left Boston at 1:40 am, and for mysterious reasons were promptly

served dinner.  Between the long flights and the 14-hour time change, we lost a whole day (resulting in me, through no fault of my own, losing my Wordle streak).  The highlight of the trip was the airport lounge in Hong Kong — -Margaret and I enjoyed a fresh fruit smoothie of the day, a delicious meal, and a very nice bathroom.  (This had the added benefit of allowing me to decline the not-very-good meal we were served on the next flight.)  The lowlight was going through Customs in Japan, which had a line that made Disney World look like nothing.  We thought our trip through US Customs at

Logan was bad when we came back from Italy, but it was nothing to the Japanese version.  I counted a total of seven steps/lines that we had to go through, right up till the end when a sprightly, non-English-speaking Japanese customs agent ran off with my suitcase (to put it through the metal detector again, apparently).

Anyway, we managed to get through the airport and onto a train to Kyoto, and from there onto a shuttle to

our hotel.  It’s a pretty nice place featuring amenties such as a heated toilet seat and a shoe dryer.  We managed to stay awake long enough to get to a nearby restaurant for noodle bowls before getting into bed around 7 pm (having been awake god knows how long).

 

For our first real day in Japan, we planned a visit to Nijo-Jo Castle, which is conveniently right across the street from our hotel.  We thought we might have trouble getting up in time for the 10am tour that we’d booked, but fortunately sleeping 7pm – 7am proved to be fairly refreshing and we ended up with plenty of time.  Margaret and I even ventured out to breakfast — at a nearby 7-11.  We’ve heard that convenience stores are much nicer and have pretty good food here, and we’d both read a Japanese book called Convenience Store Woman  that made us eager to check out the scene.  And we can report that the rumors are true.  I had something very tasty that resembled a hash brown.  Margaret is vegetarian and had fewer options, but she managed to find sufficient snacks to keep her going.  We both approved of the latte.

The castle and surrounding grounds were lovely.  Our guide told us all about the history of the Shogun regime that constructed and defended it, and its eventual transfer to the Imperial family.  It was a very interesting contrast with the lavish palaces that we’d seen in Italy.  Nijo-Jo was lavish in its own way, with much simpler and smaller rooms but elaborately painted with gold.  There was a great deal of thought given to symbolism — what was painted in each room, the level of the ceiling and the floor, and various other factors all held hidden meanings related to status and power.  I was intrigued by the Japanese philosophy of making rooms multi-functional.  When you wanted to do something in a room — say, eat dinner — furnishings like a table would be brought in from a storage room.  After use, they’d be put back, leaving the room empty for another use.

We had another tour booked in the afternoon for the Honmaru Palace within the same grounds, having planned to have lunch in between.  We were foiled by being told that we weren’t allowed to leave and re-enter, so instead of a real lunch we had to content ourselves with a snack from the castle cafe, which mosty consisted of ice cream (which was literally gold-plated, and consequently quite expensive).

After enjoying the complex’s beautiful gardens for a while, we made our way across the moat to the Honmaru Palace.  It was surrounded by high stone walls of incredible workmanship.  Giant stone bricks had been assembled to make the wall, and though they were somewhat irregularly shaped the corners of the wall were a perfect knife’s edge.  The palace itself was also beautiful — we removed our shoes and walked down halls carpeted with tatami mats (the smell of which instantly brought me back to beach trips in the 80s, where we’d purchase bamboo mats to lay our towels on).  The palace’s painting and wallpaper were gorgeous, and the atmosphere was quiet and calm since the number of visitors at a time is strictly limited.

After a brief afternoon rest, we had one more activity for the day — an evening guided tour of the Gion District, famous for geishas.  We learned a lot about the geisha lifestyle, including that it actually doesn’t involve any form of prostitution.  (Apparently Memoir of a Geisha was a lie.)  We walked past the geisha schools and heard about the grueling 5-year program that they have to follow to become a geisha (and the large amounts of money that they make afterwards).  Some interesting factoids: (1) Geishas in training have to wear their hair a specific way that takes several hours of styling, so they can only get it done once a week.  To preserve the hair they have to sleep on these special tiny pillows that looked extremely uncomfortable.  (2) Kimono worn by geishas are hand-made and cost $30,000-$60,000 apiece.  (3) Men can be geishas, but not in Kyoto.  Foreigners can also be geisha, but must be fluent in Japanese.  (I think Margaret is considering a second career.)  We only caught sight of one actual geisha, sitting in a cab, but the walk through narrow, old fashioned streets and along the river was charming regardless.

After the tour we had to find dinner, and this proved a bit of a challenge.  Margaret and I, in search of vegetarian food for her, ended up at a vegan restaurant.  It was extremely tiny — 8 seats total along a bar, with the kitchen right behind.  I think the whole place was smaller than our hotel room.  It was populated almost entirely with Westerners — I don’t think the Japanese are big on veganism — except for this one slightly drunk Japanese gentleman who hit on Margaret.  (His opening line was “You and me — same age!”, which didn’t really get things off on the right foot, since he turned out to be about 80.)  The food was amazing and the two women running the place were friendly and kind.  It was a very memorable experience.