Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

9/5/2004, Trip to Kyoto

I made my third (?) trip out to Kyoto, this time for honest-to-goodness sightseeing.

On the train, I sat across from a girl around 22 year old who spent a good 30 minutes fussing with her hair which was already done and looking perfect when she got on.  I have never seen such vain women as I see in Japan sometimes.  She sat there with a mirror and fussed with the same curl for at least 5 minutes, getting it to curl just right, getting it to lie just right on her shoulder, making sure it wasn't frayed.  Then, she got off the train and undoubtably messed it up again.  Unfortunately, I couldn't think of a polite or discrete way to get a photograph of the event.

In Kyoto, I first went to the Royal Palace park.  There's a big palace and various associated buildings that housed the empiror when Kyoto was the capital.  You have to make advanced reservations to see the palaces, but there's a huge park around it that you can go to anytime and play frisbee or whatever.  Unfortunately, all the cool stuff was behind high walls.  No pretty ponds or anything.

From there, I went to Nijou-jou, an old castle that was built in 1603 as the official residence of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a shogun.  Inside the castle, there are spacious tatami rooms with big, beautiful wall paintings.  It's very ostentatious.  My real fun at this place was in the gardens outside.  There are a handful of distinct Japanese-style gardens in the area surrounding the castle.  One of my favorite things to do in Japan is to stroll through such places.  I walked all around the premises, and at one point found a secluded spot to take a little nap.  (Got eaten by bugs, damn it.) These places are great.

A really nice woman took this picture for me in the garden near the castle.  She kept asking me how I wanted the picture composed, what side of the frame, what background, and so on.  Anyway, the garden was just gorgeous.

Here's the moat (or whatever you want to call it) that runs the perimeter of the castle itself.  It's full of big, beautiful carp.

I don't know.  I thought the signs were kinda cool.  Everything catered to foreigners there.

There were some nice views from around the castle grounds.  This was taken from some kind of raised plateau like a lookout.

Neat toilet, too.  Two seats.  One for little kids and one for big kids.  I guess it's so the little tikes don't fall in.

And don't forget to FLASH the toilet.  Makes me feel like English teachers are important people in Japan.  Either that, or they're ineffective people.

At one point, I stopped in a little shop that sells souvineers, still on the castle grounds.  I picked up some ice cream and sat down to indulge.  Being Kyoto and all, there were quite a few caucasian foreigners around, including myself of course.  A 6 year old kid sitting a few feet from me said to his parents (in Japanese), "There sure are a lot of foreigners around here, aren't there." He assumed I couldn't understand.  I looked over at him and smiled.  He knew I was on to him, but he wanted to be sure, so as a test he just said "foreigners!", to which I replied, "Yeah, there sure are." I had a nice time chatting with him and his family.

There was a neat concert of high school marching band music at the Kyoto Station.  These students were really tight.

After that, I headed back.  Osaka is on the way from Kyoto to Aioi, so I stopped in Osaka to check out the Kinokuniya bookstore and have dinner.  The bookstore was grand.  Maybe 150 kinds of mechanical pencils.  It was amazing.  A large selection of English language books as well as books for foreigners studying Japanese.  I heard a Japanese girl speaking Italian to an Italian guy, helping him with something.  Pretty cool, if you ask me.  As I was wandering around, the bookcase in front of me started swaying.  Then, I realized the whole building was shaking.  It was an earthquake.  I was at the very bottom level of a large department store type building.  It was a shakey... uh... risky place to be.  I followed a few people to a safer spot.  I made friends with the guy I was standing with and we ended up having Indian food together.  He creates video game music for Sony.  Neat guy.

I ran for the train only to find they were 15 minutes late due to the earthquake.  Japanese trains are never late.  It was very strange.  I got home and kicked around for a while.  Then, there was another earthquake.  Man is this place shakey.  Turns out they were 6.9 and 7.3 magnitude, respectively.  However, they were around 70 miles from any part of Japan, about 6 or 7 miles under the ocean.  The great Kobe earthquake of 1995 was a 7.2 and killed around 6400 people, while practically levelling a major city.  "Uh, no thank you.  Really, I'll pass on that one."

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