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Published: April 26th 2008
Ready for tea at the Ryoken
Notice the rubbish attempt at authentic Japanese arm folding from yours truly.Hi All,
Greetings from Beijing! We visited the Great Wall of China today, but I'll save that for the next, and possibly last, blog. Apologies in advance for any spelling errors; the letters on this keyboard have nearly all rubbed off so I'm typing from memory and a bit of guess work!
When I finished the last entry we had one more day left in Kyoto. We continued what we'd started on the first full day by visiting the main Buddhist temples in the city, each of which had its own special feature. The first temple had a special dry rock garden containing a number of stones which were strategically placed so that you could never see more than 14 of them. The meaning of this was unknown but you were supposed to look out over the garden and have a few moments of quiet contemplation, which is exactly what we did.
With a tight schedule we moved on to the next temple, this one set on a lake and half covered in gold when it was built in honour of the architects father. Even amongst a large number of fellow tourists, it looked stunning.
Finally we,
walked through the rest of the city including the imperial palace parks, which included more stunning cherry blossom trees, before stopping off for a tempura style dinner in a quaint siderstreet lit by traditional lanterns.
The following day we boarded the bullet train to go back for our final spell in Tokyo. We were booked to stay in a traditional Ryoken: a palce with just mats on the floor and a futon to sleep on, alongside a low table to kneel at and drink tea. To complete the authentic experience we were also provided with Kimono to wear after bathing in the evening. The place was really relaxing and we slept well (which has been a rarity) before making our next move.
The following day we went to the National Museum, crammed with artefacts from Japanese history from art to clothing and weaponry. We had a fun couple of hours meandering around the giant rooms before picking up or bags again and heading for the district of Akihabara.
Akihabara is the electronics part of the city with every shop being a video game arcade or electronics retailer with all of the new stuff that going to be
coming our way in the next few years. All the lights and noises were dizzying as we wandered round the shops waiting to check in to our accomodation: the capsule inn.
Capsule Inns are literally what they sound like, you sleep in a capsule (like a kind of plastic coffin with a blind at the end. Each cpsule has a radio, reading light and tv as well as matress crammed into the 1m by 2m space. Jaime's capsule was on a women only floor but the layour was the same: a room with two shelves of capsules. At the Capsule Inn you get a locker for the night and you can buy clean pants or even a work shirt from a vending machine. Thankfully we done some washing before we arrived.
We were up really early the following morning to go to the Tokyo fish market which is the largest in the worlld and apparently an incredible sight. I say apparently because despite dragging ourselves there for 5:45am, it turned out to be one of the two Wednesdays a month that it was closed. Cue lots of bemused looking european tourists wandering round an empty market.
And
Got to win a blue bear...
At the arcades in Akihabara that was pretty much it for Japan. We spent our last night at a hotel close to the airport ready for our flight to Beijing. Overall, we loved Japan - it's so different to any where either of us had been and the mix of this along with fantastic people, great scenery and a fantastic vibe made it a really memorable part of the trip. We'll send another blog from Hong Kong, then it's time to come home.
Wishing you all well,
Martin & Jaime
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