Now that I've finished uploading the pictures from my recent trip to Japan, it's time to start writing the blog entries. The first day was so short that this is sort of a warm-up entry. :)

I arrived at Chūbu Centrair International Airport around 5 p.m. local time on Friday. The group part of the trip wouldn't start until Monday evening in Kyoto, so I had the weekend to myself. Though my flights were uneventful, I was weary from the travel—the queues and security checks, my already-heavy luggage, the lack of private space—so I was glad that I'd reserved a room at the conveniently-located Centrair Hotel. After checking in I enjoyed a hot bath, admired the cleverness of the compact room layout, plugged in to the internets, bemoaned the poor planning that had led me to overstuff my suitcase on a vacation where I knew I'd be acquiring more stuff, and went to sleep, but not before seeing this cute commercial (or maybe it was another one in that series) on the TV:



This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/804.html.

Day 9 pictures.

This final installment of my Kyoto travelogue covers the last day of my Kyoto vacation back in May. As previously mentioned, this was a free day. It wasn't the best timing, because the Urasenke headquarters' public areas are closed on Mondays, to my understanding.

I walked from our ryokan in Higashiyama-ku over across the Kamo river. I was just getting to the point where I could find my way on my own, and we'd be leaving the next morning. Figures.

I started at Takashimaya and picked up breakfast at a boulangerie on the expansive food floor. I could only begin to list the types of shops on this floor, from international cuisine to local specialties. I literally got lost a couple of times, though I have to admit that getting lost there and not having anywhere in particular to be is not exactly an unpleasant experience. :) I picked up a package of black otabe (raw yatsuhashi, recommended by mpeg2tom!) for my tea ceremony class; several bags of baked yatsuhashi in cinnamon, sesame, and ginger flavors; and some fruit jellies that I haven't opened yet. I made my way upward, floor by floor, on the escalator. Some of the floors aren't much different from American department stores, but I made a stop in the kitchenware section to pick up a nice lemon-yellow plastic bento box and a tiny double spice shaker for including in a bento box. Further up, I wandered around in the kimono section. The kimonos there were orders of magnitude more expensive than the used ones I'd seen for sale at the temple markets earlier in our trip. It would be a good place to pick up kimono underthings and accessories, though, I think. And it's certainly interesting to browse the luxurious special-occasion kimonos on display.

I continued walking along Shijo street, turned back eastward, and walked down Kawaramachi street for a while. I stopped in an arcade to see what sophisticated video games were around and to play one of my favorites, Taiko no Tatsujin. In the middle of a weekday, the place was sparsely populated, but I noticed all of the other patrons seemed to be adolescent boys.

I made another pass through the Teramachi shopping arcade, picking up more souvenirs for myself and others: pickled vegetables, shichimi, various flavors of raw yatsuhashi. At ロンドンヤ it was great fun to watch a pair of machines make the store's signature bite-sized pancakes filled with sweet white bean paste. Here's a video. I couldn't resist trying one, fresh from the griddle, and once I'd tried one, I couldn't resist getting a box of them, packaged miyagegashi style. That's a place I'd recommend stopping by if you find yourself in Kyoto.

I wandered around for a while longer. On the way back to our place, I stopped by a Lawson's convenience store on the corner to pick up as many self-heating cans of sake as I could. We'd experienced this technological marvel on the first day of our trip, and I wanted to share it with folks back home. So I cleaned out the convenience-store shelf, checking out behind a woman walking a leashed rabbit. While my fellow patron paid for her purchase, the clerk held the rabbit for her. It was surreal. To this day I regret not snapping a photo.

For dinner, Nancy, Kathy, and I met at a tonkatsu place back in Teramachi. With a last flask of sake, I toasted farewell to Kyoto. Back at the ryokan, the proprietors gifted us with more kimonos than we could fit into our overstuffed suitcases. My kimono wardrobe was instantly doubled thanks to their generosity. I do need to practice putting them on so I can do it without a great deal of assistance. I'd love to be able to wear one to a tea ceremony event and send them a picture.

And that wraps up my trip to Kyoto. Any questions? :)

My photos from Day Eight.

Sunday was our day to escape the urban bustle of Kyoto and head north to the countryside area of Ohara. We took taxis there, and it probably shouldn't have been a surprise that the driver of the taxi I shared with three others in our tour group turned out not really to have understood the instructions our organizers quickly gave him through the open door of the cab before we set off. So we rode back and forth along the main road, wondering where we were supposed to be dropped off and lacking any way to communicate with the rest of the group. The driver stopped a couple of times to ask for directions, but that didn't appear to prove illuminating. Eventually we stopped somewhere and found our way to the rest of the group, who were starting the walk up the hill that seems to be the main tourist area of Ohara.

The path up the hill winds through scenic woodlands and alongside a stream; stalls selling pickled vegetables and handicrafts dot the path. The scooter and kitty in that photo belong to a jewelry vendor along the path; later in the day the cat could be seen—detached from the scooter—curled up next to the jewelry cart. Its portable litter box was a mere ceramic bowl. What a cat.

At the top of the hill, a flat boulevard lined with more shops and eateries takes visitors to a series of temples. We went to Shorin-in Temple, a Tendai sect temple founded in 1013. Inside is a large Buddha statue and a tape recorder playing Shōmyō chant, a style that was introduced to Japan from China at this very temple.

We descended to have lunch at a rustic restaurant at the foot of the hill. What I remember most from the lunch were the yummy grilled tofu with its caramelized miso glaze and the young women dressed in traditional Oharame costume at another table.

Our afternoon activity was dyeing fabric—scarves in this case—with natural plant dyes (Kusaki-zome) at a rural workshop. Our hosts were very gracious, chatting with us over tea as a gentle breeze blew through the house. It was so peaceful there. Once each of us had picked out an undyed scarf we liked, we learned about the dyes we'd use to color them: indigo for blue (we were getting to be quite familiar with indigo by the end of the trip), Japanese cedar for brown, madder root for red, Pagoda Tree for yellow. One of the happiest moments I remember from the trip was standing in the dyeing shed, stirring my scarf around in a warm pot of yellow dye, inhaling the scent of woodsmoke, looking out the window at the countryside.

We took a bus back to Kyoto, a ride that seemed longer for our having to stand and for the late-afternoon sun blazing through the bus windows. Once we got back to the ryokan and freshened up, we went to a restaurant with tatami mats and a low table for our big farewell dinner. We wouldn't actually be leaving until Tuesday, but the next day would be a "free" day where we'd be on our own, so this was the last evening we'd be together. We presented Junko and Gary with "omiyage" from North America (thanks to thewronghands for the Old Bay Seasoning suggestion—since Gary likes to cook, I hope he'll enjoy the canister I gave him). One of our group, Guy, had forgone the Ohara outing to catch a baseball game on his own at Koshien Stadium, and just about the time we were figuring he must be lost in the streets of Osaka, our organizer Nancy got a call from him reporting that he'd made it back to Kyoto; he joined us shortly afterward. Beer and sake flowed. Late into the evening, we bid farewell as Junko left to catch the bus back to her place, Gary rollerbladed back to his machiya (no, that's not a typical mode of transport in Japan), and the rest of us wandered back to larger streets to catch taxis.

My pictures from Day 7.

This day began with a traditional Japanese breakfast: grilled salted salmon, rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables, tofu, an egg, some fresh fruit (I don't think that's traditional), and green tea. That makes for a large breakfast—certainly not what an average Japanese person eats before rushing out of the house each morning.

Then it was our turn for a handful of us to try shibori dyeing (as introduced in my Day 2 post). We each picked out one of the thin white scarves that came to the workshop pre-tied in different patterns. It was a very pleasant Saturday morning, and we chatted with the proprietor's English-speaking son while he showed us the technique. It turns out that dyeing with natural indigo—and maybe other dyes as well—is much more about the time the fabric spends in the air between dippings than about the time it spends immersed in the dye. Since the chemical reactions that happen when the wet fabric is exposed to the air are key, we spent most of our time carefully unfolding wet fabric that had bunched up during the immersion and rinsing parts of the process. I'm pleased with how my scarf turned out, but it seems I neglected to take any pictures of it. I like how it still smells faintly of the indigo dye; I'm in no hurry to wash that nostalgic smell out of it.

At lunch we met up with the rest of our group, who had been spending the morning touring the neighborhood around our ryokan, including Kōdai-ji and Yasaka Shrine. Then we hopped a train to Fushimi, where we of course saw the famous orange gates of Fushimi Inari-taisha. You may remember those gates if you've seen Memoirs of a Geisha. These gates were also a major inspiration for the 2005 New York City art installation The Gates. The sheer number of torii here—and thus the length of the paths they defined—was amazing. I wish we could have spent more time at this shrine, especially because there were some Shinto ceremonies going on that looked pretty interesting. Next time I'm in Kyoto, Fushimi Inari-taisha is on my list of places to re-visit in more depth.

Next on our schedule was a tour of Gekkeikan's sake brewery. As we screened an English-language film about how sake is made, I was impressed by the complexity of the process. At the end of a walk through their museum, we sampled a few different types of sake, perused the gift shop, and posed for a group picture. Here I'll note that I did not succeed in my quest to buy space sake on this trip. :( Our organizer's Japanese assistant wasn't at all familiar with this novelty item and told me it seemed to be available through mail order only.

A relaxing canal boat tour along the Uji River was next for us. Our boat stopped at a lock where the towers were open for the public to ascend and take in a scenic view of the area, which the younger of us did. It was windy but fun.

As the sun set, we wandered through town toward a restaurant where we had a reservation. I bought some kimono accessories at a shop along the way. I also picked up some packets of a flavored drink mix for which I've yet to translate the directions. Dinner was somewhat disappointing, mostly because they ran out of their specialty buckwheat ice cream when they'd served everyone but me. Ice cream makes me happy. No ice cream—when it's been talked up, and I've waited and waited—makes me unhappy.

Day six photos.

On Friday morning we got up early to visit the second temple market of our trip: Tenjin. After I returned from the trip, I read that Wikipedia entry, which says

A Kyoto proverb proclaims, "Fair weather at Toji market means rainy weather at Tenjin market," calling to mind Kyoto's fickle weather.

It could not have been more accurate. Some vendors had set up their booths, but there were many empty spots and vendors who had only half-heartedly set up. We had umbrellas, but we couldn't help getting soggy and discouraged anyway, just like the vendors. I wish I'd photographed the booth selling nothing but kompeito—bin after bin in different color combinations.

While most of our group was at the market, our luggage was being transported from the Western-style hotel to Rikiya, a ryokan where we'd stay for the remainder of the trip. I stayed in a big room with Nancy (the trip leader), Sabrina, and Kathy. I mentioned in a previous travelogue post about the strange room-key protocol at Japanese hotels. Well, at the ryokan, there is no room key. There are generally people (staff, if not fellow guests) "around"; it's what I'd call a high-trust environment. After doing some sightseeing, I'd return to the ryokan through the front gate, take off my shoes at the genkan, walk down the hall to our room and go right in. Our room had a door, but I don't think there was any lock. What a feeling to live in a place like that!

We all ate lunch that day at an Italian restaurant in a high-rise building with a view over the city and the Kamo River, now rushing with water. I think it might have been our only big Western-style meal. The restaurant's antipasto buffet included a worldly assortment of things like collard greens, gazpacho, couscous, and fruit salad. Nancy ordered us a bunch of different kinds of pizza and pasta to share, which streamlined the decision-making process (much as it did at all the other restaurants we patronized as a group), but it sometimes resulted in a table of diners casting wary glances at an uneaten pizza topped with ingredients nobody wanted (whole small fish, anyone?). That was the exception, though.

After lunch, Junko took me shopping for tea-ceremony-related things. First we hit Ippodo, a tea shop par excellence, where I bought a small tin of matcha and a packet of shincha. Proceeding south along Teramachi-dōri, we stopped at a wagashi shop and then a sort of general store for traditional cultural pursuits, where I picked up a new fukusabasami, some kaishi with a cute baby-blue print on it, and the kōdō starter stuff I mentioned before. Junko mentioned she, too, was intrigued by this kōdō stuff and was thinking of trying it herself.

For dinner, we all went to an izakaya, where we sat around a counter and passed plates among ourselves: okonomiyaki, sashimi, korokke, and lots more that I don't recall. My dessert was matcha mochi cubes accompanied by a scoop of vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce, sprinkled with corn flakes. Taste- and texture-wise, it works; it's just so odd.

Once again, my groupies chickened out of after-dinner karaoke, but as we hit a sake-and-beer vending machine on the walk back to the ryokan, some singing took place anyway. So that's another thing about Japan: there doesn't seem to be any stigma about drinking in public places. In Japan, alcohol goes hand-in-hand with blossom-viewing, whereas you'd better not be caught with any alcoholic drink on the shores of the tidal basin over here. That's at least one area where Japan has the more libertarian view.

Day 5 pictures.

Let's see what I can remember from Day 5. In the morning, we went to a roketsuzome workshop: this place, to be specific. Roketsuzome is a traditional wax-resist textile dyeing technique similar to batik. They showed us how to paint wax on fabric (tracing over ready-made designs) and let us try our hands at it. I picked out a pretty design depicting a Heian court lady with long hair and kimono blowing in a breeze. It soon turned out to be problematic, though, because it had lots of thin lines spaced close together, and it's difficult to get liquid wax to form thin lines. I was making a mess of it, so I gave up and tried a different design, this time one depicting the country cottage of a Japanese poet. After painting on the design in wax, each of us took a turn working the indigo dye vat while our fabric was in it. Most people in our group made noren, at least one made a t-shirt, and a few (like me) made a general-purpose wall-hanging.

After lunch, we all attended a maiko (apprentice geisha) dance at Pontochō Kaburenjo Theater. The production was part narrative, part dance. The singing style was something new for me, high and warbling, an "acquired taste" like Western opera. The dancing and costumes were gorgeous, as could probably be expected in this mecca of Japanese traditional culture.

If I recall correctly, afterwards was when some of us went to a multi-story bookstore in a nearby neighborhood. The others browsed the English-language section while I tried to browse the rest of the store without making them wait too long for me. I spent my money in the children's books section—just like I did on my first trip to Japan—because those were books I have a shot and reading and understanding. :) On the "low" end of the scale, I picked up ミッフィーのたのしいテント (Miffy's Fun Tent) to compliment the copy of ミッフィーのおばけごっこ (Miffy the Make-Believe Ghost) I got last time. The other books I bought are a little more advanced, for kids who are learning kanji. One of them is a book of "10-minute stories" recommended for parents to read with their children each morning.

My memory is getting a little fuzzy when it comes to these bits of free time during which I neglected to take pictures, but I think dinner was "on our own" that evening. Austin, Guy, and I wandered Teramachi-dōri for a while, checking out the souvenir shops, including one store that had a truly amazing selection of chopsticks and chopstick rests. Underground, in Zest, we ran into Chris and Julia, whose appetites were more towards shopping than eating. Looking for a restaurant with suitable ambiance, we settled down at そじ坊, a soba shop that serves its dishes with a hunk of wasabi root and a grater. It appeared that patrons could even take the leftover portion of wasabi root home with them in a little sealable plastic baggie provided at the tables. We had an entertaining time communicating with the staff, who were really friendly and helpful and who seemed to speak less English than I speak Japanese, which is not much. Our waitress really seemed to be hoping some co-worker with more English proficiency would step up and help her out, but no such co-worker existed, and so in between—sometimes in the middle of—our transactions, she'd rush to the back, and we could hear giggling coming from the kitchen as they tried to figure out how to deal with us foreigners. Despite all the fuss, we managed to order and be served delicious meals, mine tempura soba and my companions' chilled soba. We listened in fascination as salarymen at other tables slurped loudly; we had a tough time adhering to the noodle-slurping etiquette, though we tried. As we paid our bill, we thanked our waitress with little regional gifts from our hometowns—postcards and a magnet—and were thanked in return with a bag of そばかりんとう, fried soba sticks coated in sugar. In fact I'm snacking on some of them as I write this. It was a memorable dinner.

Day four pictures.

We kicked off Day Four with a visit to Ginkaku-ji, the famous Silver Pavilion that isn't actually silver. More throngs of uniformed schoolchildren on field trips. The youngest students' "uniforms" are merely yellow caps, which I hear is because they grow too fast to bother with full uniforms. Ginkaku-ji and its grounds are, of course, beautiful, and in a way that brings to mind the Japanese adjective kirei, which tellingly means not just pretty/beautiful but also clean/neat. We saw maintenance workers throughout the temple grounds, skimming something from the ponds, trimming trees, sweeping up brush.

It was another sunny, warm day, so after visiting Ginkaku-ji, we stopped for soft-serve ice cream at the bottom of the hill. I love matcha ice cream, but I can find it back home, so I opted to try some hojicha ice cream. Very refreshing! Funny how I remember the food from this trip so well. :)

It was natural from there to walk for a while along the Philosopher's Path. I hear it's gorgeous during cherry-blossom season, but it was pleasant enough in late May. Along the path I stopped to check out Hōnen-in, a small, quiet temple with distinctive mounds of raked sand.

We ate lunch on the deck of a Pontochō restaurant, overlooking the Kamo River. It was another set meal with many small dishes but unfortunately not enough water to quench the thirst of over a dozen people who'd been walking all morning. They did give us cute fans with a map to the restaurant on one side, though. :)

In the afternoon, we went to Tondaya for what we understood to be a kimono-dressing lesson. Turns out that's not quite what they were going to offer: instead of kimono-dressing lessons, we could pay to be sort-of dressed up in kimono that we could wear while on a tour of their historic house. We agreed that one woman in our group would do it, and the slapdash way they dressed her is what prompted me to write "sort-of dressed up" in the previous sentence. The house tour was okay, but a subsequent hard-sell display of their silks left a sour taste in our mouths. It was the only really disappointing part of the trip, as even our organizer would admit.

A visit to the Kyoto Handicraft Center was next, if I remember correctly. It's a several-story building with cloisonné, fabrics, kimonos, lacquerware, wall art, dolls, and all kinds of souvenirs, more for sale than on display, and all geared toward foreign tourists. I got a lacquer bento box that even with three layers is small enough to prompt jokes from the gang about it being a bento box for dieters. Elsewhere on the trip I picked up a few plastic bento boxes and accessories at 100-yen stores and at Takashimaya, pushing my set of bento boxes over the edge into "collection" territory. I figure lunch is a good cause. :) Another young woman in the group professed to being a fellow fan of Bento TV, though for her it's more of a spectator sport.

Dinner that evening was one of the most fun meals of the trip. The name of the restaurant appears to be 串入, which I'm getting from one of a set of copies of their menu that our organizer dashed over to a copy shop to make (after getting permission from the restaurant, of course). That's how much we loved the graphic design of their menu. Here's a photograph of most of one side of it; as you can see, it's an English version of their menu. Food on stick! How can you not love this place? Anything you can imagine, they'll put it on a stick and either grill it or fry it. Sitting at a counter around the cooking area, we ordered and passed around a variety of Food on Stick: shrimp, chicken, squid, sausage, yam, eggplant, lotus root, mushrooms, konnyaku, pumpkin... I even ordered grilled garlic toast on a stick. :) It seemed like a comfy neighborhood spot, the cooks calling out "Irasshaimase!" to entering patrons, many of whom seemed to be a little taken aback by the crowd of foreigners dominating the counter space. We had a great time. Yuzu sherbet made a perfect end to my meal. Afterwards I tried to get folks to join me for karaoke, but they were all party-poopers.

Day three pictures.

Another early morning: this time to beat the crowds to Ryōan-ji, a temple with a famous Zen rock garden. The crowds wouldn't be fellow tourists but rather kids on school field trips. We did enjoy a while there in the hushed morning stillness. In my fantasies I'd love to have the grounds all to myself. I'd stretch out on the moss, close my eyes, take a deep breath...

But we were off to the next activity: a katazome workshop. Here they take long stretches of white silk and use stencils to paint pigment on them, producing elaborate designs. Each nine-meter bolt of finished silk leaves the workshop to be sewn into a furisode. This wasn't a hands-on workshop; we just watch them do their thing, oo-ing and ah-ing over the precision of their technique and the beauty of their results. And the expensiveness of the results: my impression was that the finished garment would carry a price tag of well over $10,000.

And then we were off to another temple, this time Daitoku-ji. I wish I'd read up on it beforehand and realized it's where Sen no Rikyū, godfather of Japanese tea ceremony, is buried. We walked here and there throughout the temple grounds. I think the only building we could enter was a little one set up to provide a break for weary tourists with benches, shade from the hot sun, and a cup of (hot) tea. It was refreshing anyway. I was feeling smart for having brought my parasol, being that the sun was pretty brutal that day. After wandering through what seemed like a maze of walled pathways, we reached Izusen, a restaurant within the temple grounds that serves Buddhist cuisine. Under a canopy of trees, we sat at low tables attended by servers who brought out a cavalcade of small dishes for each of us. Even if I didn't love every dish (I couldn't identify many of them), the idyllic garden setting made the meal just blissful.

After lunch we spent some more time wandering around Daitoku-ji and over to Daisen-in. Outside of the temple, we stopped for a grilled dango snack and wrapped up our sightseeing for the day.

I must have taken a nap after that, because the next thing I remember—and the next thing in my pictures—is dinner at a noodle shop near the Teramachi shopping district. I had a bowl of delicious ramen in a dark soy-sauce broth. At the end of the meal each of our tables was presented with a special treat on the house: a fish head. I hear the cheek meat is good, but I don't think anyone touched the eyes. A few of us went to the shopping district afterwards, but there were very few shops open that late into the evening.

Pictures from this day.

We got up early on Monday morning to beat the crowds to the famous Tō-ji market held on the twenty-first day of every month. This is a big market with vendors selling clothes (old, new, western, Japanese), food, crafts, plants, antiques, tools and utensils, souvenirs, toys—all manner of things. Many of the others in our group shopped for inexpensive kimono and obi to cut up for their own fabric projects or to display. At first I cringed at the idea of cutting up a kimono, but I gradually got used to hearing about it. The cheap ones aren't cheap for no reason. I didn't buy any, figuring I have a decent wardrobe of them for the number of opportunities I have to wear them (and given that I can't even dress by myself yet!), plus I don't trust myself to be able to know which ones are good deals and inspect them thoroughly enough to verify that they're in tea ceremony-worthy condition. We were told that we should negotiate on prices at this market, but I think I forgot to, what with my way of spotting a price tag and just assuming that's the price I'd pay.

Some of what I bought at the market are gifts that have yet to be given to their recipients, so I won't mention the specifics of those, but here's what I got for myself:

• loose green tea; I don't know what variety, because I can't read the scribbly kanji on the label, but I'm sure it'll be good
  
• woven wall hanging with an integrated bud vase
  
• several pretty tenugui
  
• acorn cell-phone charm
  
• driving gloves with a roketsuzome design on the top and a grippy material on the underside
  
• cloth menstrual pad; I'm getting into these back home but didn't expect to find them for sale in Japan, but there were hippies here too :)
  
• matching wallet pouch, cell phone pouch, and furoshiki
  
• toe socks with bunnies and cherries on the toes
  

By mid-day the market was intensely crowded; it didn't help that the stalls seemed to be on the way to or from school (or wherever they were going) for hordes of schoolchildren who weren't especially interested in the market. Having gotten in several good hours of browsing, we were exhausted by the crowds, so we grabbed a lunch of okonomiyaki from a booth (I didn't really like it, but hey, I tried it) and departed.

Our next destination was Aizen Kobo, a traditional indigo-dyeing workshop. The owner told us all about natural indigo dyeing: the plant, the history, the industry. He claimed that artificial dyes can't replicate the hue of natural indigo, that one can tell the difference in looking at digital photos of dyed fabric (despite their looking the same in person or on plain old film?), and that artificially dyed "indigo" fabric fades to gray whereas naturally dyed indigo fabric fades to lighter shades of blue. He also extolled natural indigo dye's virtues as a mosquito- and snake-repellent and as some sort of cancer preventer. This was to be a hands-on workshop, too, with our group being divided into three smaller groups to take turns at dyeing, with the first round beginning after the owner's talk, but for whatever reason that wasn't to happen that day. Our organizer Nancy shifted into back-room diplomat gear and worked out a way to shuffle the schedule so that we could all have a chance over the next several days to stop back by the workshop and dye a piece of fabric.

After that, I think some of our group walked over to the Nishijin Textile Center, but I went with the portion of us who returned to the hotel for some quiet time with a glass of wine and a book at the streetside cafe.

That evening we dined at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant. The sushi was fine, but I wish there'd been more variety coming down the conveyor belt. At least I'm not the one at our table who fell victim to the stealth wasabi bomb! It looked painful. My favorite thing about conveyor-belt sushi places isn't the conveyor belt, actually. It's the hot-water tap and supply of tea at each table—here there were little drawers with a selection of different teas—so you're never waiting for more tea. To me, that's a perfect arrangement. At this type of restaurant, when you're finished and ready to pay, the cost of each item is signaled by the color of the plate it was on. Customers stack up their empty plates, and a waiter comes by to tally them up. At this restaurant, a waitress used what appeared to be a hand-held optical scanner to produce our bill in a couple quick waves of the device. Neat. And so Japanese. :)

My pictures from Day One.

I got to Kyoto (and back) via SFO and NGO. On the way there, I didn't sleep much, probably because I was too excited. My new folding foot stand came in handy, though—I'm going to take it on all flights in the future. If you're short like me, I recommend one for bringing the floor up to your feet anywhere you have to sit for a long time. Somewhere over the Pacific I watched the second half or so of Children of Men. Even though I know how it ends, I liked it enough to add it to my rental queue so I can see the whole thing.

It was at baggage claim in NGO where I met my first fellow groupie, Kathy from Philadelphia. This autumn I'll have to go visit her and Shofuso, of which we're both members. Shortly afterward we met Bobbie and Jody, longtime buddies from California, and the four of us set off for Kyoto via Meitetsu, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, and taxi. Between hauling our luggage around, accidentally plopping ourselves down in a smoking car, and finding our taxi drivers had taken us to the wrong hotel, we were very tired by the time we got to our hotel in Kyoto. But not more tired than we were hungry: our organizer's local friend Junko met us and took us out to a little neighborhood restaurant where I enjoyed a thoroughly fortifying bowl of curry udon.

For the six nights we stayed at the western-style hotel, I had a single room. A weird thing about some (most?) Japanese hotels is that you're supposed to turn in your room key to the front desk every time you leave the hotel premises and pick it up when you return. I assume this is to prevent the copying of room keys, but until and unless the front desk staff gets to know your face, you could be a random stranger walking up to the front desk and requesting a key for any room you want, without showing any identification. Weird security.

On the morning of our first full day in Kyoto, after getting to know each other in our group of 14-15 people, we took a walk through Kyōto Gyoen (the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto) and then along the Kamo River.
Especially fun was crossing the river by hopping across stones carved into turtle shapes. Junko was great about getting lunch and dinner reservations for our group at awesome little restaurants we never would otherwise have found, and which would have imploded had we surprised them with a group of our size. Lunch our first day was oyakodon, sprinkled experimentally with spices like shichimi.

Kyōto Gyoen, with its relatively wide open spaces, seemed like a good place to break out my GPS receiver, but even after twenty minutes (or maybe more) it couldn't see more than one satellite. I expected it would take a little while to gets its bearings after being hauled to the other side of the planet, but its disorientation overcame my patience.

Our group traveled medium distances by taxi, which was a contrast with my previous trip to Japan, when I rode the rails. When you can squeeze four passengers in a taxi, it's apparently pretty economical. (The trip fee we paid up front covered all transportation within Japan as well as lodging and almost all meals; I didn't work out the numbers.) Taxis in Japan are quite nice, with their white gloves; crisp service caps; immaculate, doilied interiors; and automatically-opening and -closing passenger doors.

After lunch, we stopped by Miyako Messe, an exhibition hall that was showing kimono, various textile work, and other traditional craftwork. Along with some of the exhibits were video screens playing some exquisitely produced footage of traditional crafts being made in traditional ways. In retrospect, I wish I could've bought a DVD of it.

Next we walked over to the Hosomi Museum, where we attended a tea ceremony in Koko-an and viewed the museum's collection of old Noritake china produced in Japan for export to various countries. I feel shamefully consumerist saying so, but my favorite part was their gift shop, brimming as it was with lovely and interesting "art goods". (That's right, the tea ceremony wasn't my favorite part; it was fine, but with over a dozen guests, almost all of them new to tea ceremony and never instructed in guest etiquette, it's naturally a different experience from what I have in my local tea circle.)

The evening brought us to the home of Gary, a local buyer for and acquaintance of our trip organizer; he rents a deteriorating old machiya. Over bento dinners, we marveled at the place while lamenting that it will probably be razed and replaced with soulless, concrete condominiums. After dinner, Gary invited over a guy he knows who does kōdō (Japanese incense ceremony) for a demonstration. He passed out little coded sachets and explained genjikō, a game played with them. He also showed us how incense wood chips are warmed on a bed of ash embedded with burning charcoal. I was inspired to buy—later in the trip—some white ash, ceremonial charcoal, sandalwood chips, and a mica plate so I can try kōdō at home. Incense is a part of Japanese tea ceremony, but not a part our teacher has explained yet in our class.