Japan trip report 27 Sep
Dec. 13th, 2011 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinianI will eventually post all of these, and hopefully someone will read them.
After having pastries for breakfast, our first stop was Wim's choice, Nijō Castle.
Cormorant! And a more modern building at the end of the moat.
Absolutely beautiful details on everything, including this creepy eye above an interior gate.
I hadn't been that excited about this castle, but it wound up being one of my favorite things we did. The palace is open to walk through and admire the wall paintings, and you're treading on nightingale floor the whole way. We've made jokes that our creaky old floor was a nightingale floor, but the real thing is impressive: relatively unpredictable in singing when you step in a different area of plank, and surprisingly musical and pleasant even when tons of tourists are tramping along on it in their socks. The wall paintings were great, too. (Sorry, no photos allowed inside.)
The gardens were even more beautiful than Nagoya Castle's, possibly because Nijō was never used for war, and we saw an additional exhibit of paintings and items found in archeological digs on the castle grounds.
Complete with elegant heron!
And there was an adorable yet untouchable-looking caterpillar outside at the bus stop, tucked into a hollow in the peeling bark.
I had decided that I was going to feel silly if we left Kyoto without going to Kinkakuji Temple and seeing the gold pavilion, so off we went. It is covered in actual gold, which of course in such quantity and outdoors looks fake. So shiny and yellow.
The most wonderful thing about it wasn't any of the artifacts, though of course the pavilion is unbelievable and the grounds are soothingly lovely.
(Wim is holding the rather impressive entry ticket.)
The most wonderful thing was that we saw a very large dragonfly, 5-6 inches maybe, laying her eggs in one of the tricking stream areas. She'd hover and dab, dab, dab her abdomen on the shallow water, then move to another area. I took a bunch of photos, and only in this one can you kind of tell what's going on. She's exactly in the middle, and you can see her body touching down on the mud even though her wings aren't visible.
Also pretty great: getting interviewed by elementary school children for their English homework.
We ate curry rice and hayashi rice for lunch. The two were more different than I expected based on the joke about their similarity in Azumanga Daioh. Wim had matcha afterward. The proprietor spoke a little English and was very friendly, and laughed a bunch when Wim said "okanjou o kudasai" asking for the bill. We think it was too formal for a tiny lunch counter in addition to being cute-foreigners-think-they-can-talk? but wish we'd asked about the finer points of etiquette there!
Next stop, Kyoto International Manga Museum. We spent a lot more time here than I thought we would. They have an enormous manga library which you can read on the grounds, though obviously this is mostly useful if you read Japanese since only a few volumes are translated ones. I really liked the exhibit of recent German comics and wish I hadn't put all my stuff in a coin locker so I could have noted the artists' names. We also got Moyashimon stuff out of a capsule machine! Hee! (No photos allowed.)
We further amused ourselves by going to an "Irish" pub. The music was awful, but the food wasn't bad: spicy fried potato wedges are not Irish I think but were yummy, fish and chips, shepherd's pie. We were there during happy hour but the Guinness and Strongbow were still damned expensive. This did not stop Wim from drinking two, threatening to sing "Danny Boy", and proclaiming his drunkenness all the way back to the Kyoto Tour Club.
Random hilarious merchandise: "Bambi eye" false eyelashes.
Random disturbing merchandise: gun lamps. These came in a variety of sizes, including pistol/desktop lamp and this one. Yikes?
After having pastries for breakfast, our first stop was Wim's choice, Nijō Castle.
Cormorant! And a more modern building at the end of the moat.
Absolutely beautiful details on everything, including this creepy eye above an interior gate.
I hadn't been that excited about this castle, but it wound up being one of my favorite things we did. The palace is open to walk through and admire the wall paintings, and you're treading on nightingale floor the whole way. We've made jokes that our creaky old floor was a nightingale floor, but the real thing is impressive: relatively unpredictable in singing when you step in a different area of plank, and surprisingly musical and pleasant even when tons of tourists are tramping along on it in their socks. The wall paintings were great, too. (Sorry, no photos allowed inside.)
The gardens were even more beautiful than Nagoya Castle's, possibly because Nijō was never used for war, and we saw an additional exhibit of paintings and items found in archeological digs on the castle grounds.
Complete with elegant heron!
And there was an adorable yet untouchable-looking caterpillar outside at the bus stop, tucked into a hollow in the peeling bark.
I had decided that I was going to feel silly if we left Kyoto without going to Kinkakuji Temple and seeing the gold pavilion, so off we went. It is covered in actual gold, which of course in such quantity and outdoors looks fake. So shiny and yellow.
The most wonderful thing about it wasn't any of the artifacts, though of course the pavilion is unbelievable and the grounds are soothingly lovely.
(Wim is holding the rather impressive entry ticket.)
The most wonderful thing was that we saw a very large dragonfly, 5-6 inches maybe, laying her eggs in one of the tricking stream areas. She'd hover and dab, dab, dab her abdomen on the shallow water, then move to another area. I took a bunch of photos, and only in this one can you kind of tell what's going on. She's exactly in the middle, and you can see her body touching down on the mud even though her wings aren't visible.
Also pretty great: getting interviewed by elementary school children for their English homework.
We ate curry rice and hayashi rice for lunch. The two were more different than I expected based on the joke about their similarity in Azumanga Daioh. Wim had matcha afterward. The proprietor spoke a little English and was very friendly, and laughed a bunch when Wim said "okanjou o kudasai" asking for the bill. We think it was too formal for a tiny lunch counter in addition to being cute-foreigners-think-they-can-talk? but wish we'd asked about the finer points of etiquette there!
Next stop, Kyoto International Manga Museum. We spent a lot more time here than I thought we would. They have an enormous manga library which you can read on the grounds, though obviously this is mostly useful if you read Japanese since only a few volumes are translated ones. I really liked the exhibit of recent German comics and wish I hadn't put all my stuff in a coin locker so I could have noted the artists' names. We also got Moyashimon stuff out of a capsule machine! Hee! (No photos allowed.)
We further amused ourselves by going to an "Irish" pub. The music was awful, but the food wasn't bad: spicy fried potato wedges are not Irish I think but were yummy, fish and chips, shepherd's pie. We were there during happy hour but the Guinness and Strongbow were still damned expensive. This did not stop Wim from drinking two, threatening to sing "Danny Boy", and proclaiming his drunkenness all the way back to the Kyoto Tour Club.
Random hilarious merchandise: "Bambi eye" false eyelashes.
Random disturbing merchandise: gun lamps. These came in a variety of sizes, including pistol/desktop lamp and this one. Yikes?
no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 12:06 pm (UTC)I think I can top the gun lamp. I once saw, in a sex shop, a handgun vibrator. It was shiny chrome-coloured plastic, and the trigger was the on switch. The idea of pointing something gun-shaped at my privates and pulling the trigger gives me the heebie-jeebies, but clearly someone bought the thing, coz it wasn't there when I came back some while later. Go figure. *shudder*
Lovely photos, btw. I do enjoy your travel-photo-posts. Thanks for sharing them.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 06:48 pm (UTC)Thanks for the encouragement!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-17 05:48 am (UTC)