Kyoto: Typhoons and Temples

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The minute we touched down in Tokyo, we heard rumors of an impending typhoon headed this direction. I’m not going to lie, as expensive as Japan is, the best 1,000 Yen we possibly spent was on umbrellas at the first train station. You can’t rain on this parade. Or as we soon found out, you can’t rain on this parade of temples.

Kyoto was the ancient capitol of Japan and still the center of the ancient Japanese traditional culture. The city, a bigger city of one and a half million people, contains seventeen UNESCO World Heritage sites. If you are unfamiliar with this distinction, just imagine the coolest thing that an area could have and that is it (here it’s temples. Remember Vietnam, the post AH-mazing Halong Bay ? That UNESCO was Halong Bay. Does that help?) So, seventeen UNESCO sites including a castle, forty seven million temples, and some kind of a shrine around every bonsai tree… this place was going to be cool.

With only one week here, we decided to take in the old world Japan and finish with some crazy electronic modernity and urbanity in Tokyo. With a three hour ‘bullet train’ ride (I’ll explain how cool these are in the next post) we arrived in Kyoto, along with more rain.

We reserved a hostel, which won’t be the best place we’ve ever stayed (it won’t be worse than that thing we stayed at in Manila), but it was really cool because it was all Japanese style rooms. That means, the entire room is lined with straw mats as flooring and we were given oversized comforters to sleep on. Not the best place, but still cool to have that kind of experience.

The highest conglomeration of temples sat at the base of a mountain ridge on the edge of town, so there is where we started our assault on the old world.

The first temple complex turned out to be one of our favorites. Kiyomizu-Dera, its official name, sits up the mountain a bit in a small alcove of lush forest that overlooks the city. It was so beautiful seeing the dark stained lumber against the green forest. The largest of the buildings was built out over the hill with a back deck that had the grandest view. It was awesome. I couldn’t believe the scale of the buildings, putting Korean temples to shame, and looking out over the city, four and five story ancient wooden pagodas towered above any modern building around it. They were dotted all over the city.

Following a sample walking tour that was lined out for us in our LonelyPlant, little did they know about the typhoon or they’d have suggested something with a roof, eh?. We continued on to the next shrine (sorry, the particular name escapes me), but each of these has their own distinct beauty and atmosphere.

There, we opted to try the traditional tea and cake. Now I have learned a lot about myself in the travels we’ve taken in the past year, I’m a sucker for rice terraces, anything traditional, you know- yadda yadda yadda, One thing I’ve learned is, that if this was the actual stuff they ate and drank in the old days, I’m sure glad I live in a different time. This little situation may be the opposite of “I’m a sucker for…” I don’t even know what that would be, but that sums it up.

We gave our 500 Yen to the adorable ladies, in full kimono, waiting at the entrance to a beautiful old building with the typical paper walls (Karate Kid type of stuff). They greeted us with huge smiles and quickly shuffled around as we knelt down in the designated spot.

A middle aged, plump Japanese lady scurried out from behind a door with a tray. She gave Cass and I a bowl and a plate. The black bowl contained some of the most peutrid smelling, bright green tea I’ve ever seen before. The small plate had an even smaller white cube placed right in the middle of it. I had to take pictures of this knowing that this was just another one of those things…

Cass took a small sip and almost threw up on the bamboo floors; I think they call that a reversal in competitive eating. Waving one panicked hand in the air, the other holding her mouth shut as to contain any stomach items that may have found new freedom.

I’ll never forget her face at this point. As if she just ate a turd (and you know what kind of face you’d make if in that position), she quickly reached for the glimmering crystalline cube to get whatever she was tasting, out of her mouth. Nipping off a small corner, she almost doubled over in a powerful gag; terror in her eyes and two hands over her mouth. The pure sugar coating revealed something maroonish, and of a bean paste consistency.

After that debacle, I couldn’t just get up and leave untouched tea and cake; imagine the dishonor that would be to their culture. So, in true fear factor form, I grabbed the bowl of frothy green discharge and took the largest drink I possibly could. It tasted something like a combination of garden variety weeds blended in that old Saturday Night Live skit’s Bassomatic (where a whole fish gets blended up to make a juice). It was repulsive, but sometimes you need to chalk it up to a cultural experience. The sugar cube was exactly what it looked like, a quarter inch of pure sugar, the kind you put into your morning coffee but pressed tight, and some kind of paste that’s seen better days.

I just couldn’t do it, took another gulp as if it were polyjuice potion (Harry Potter fans know how bad that would taste), and another snippet of sugar and we made like a tree.

There were also some really cool shops that reminded me of the hutong neighborhoods we saw in Beijing. For all you LonelyPlanet weilding tourists out there, look for the an area of town called Ninen-Zaka & Sannei-Zaka, it's a wonderful, yet still traditional, break from temple hopping. This was only one, but throughout town, there were entire areas that were reconstructed traditional buildings, with cobblestone streets and funky shops. They were very scenic, intimate, and had a cool atmosphere despite the rain. We spent much of the afternoon and evening exploring these and any other temple place we stumbled across which were a few, actually.

The next morning we made it a point to check out one of the more famous sites in Japan, Kinkaku-ji, or the golden pavilion. I’ve seen pictures of this before and thought it was cool, so it is a must for anyone in or near Kyoto since it’s right on the edge of town. It’s a building that is virtually floating in the middle of a lake, and it is almost entirely wrapped in gold. It was quite a thing to see in the mist, I can only imagine the blinding capabilities it has on a nice sunny day. It is a three story building in a pond that is surrounded by, and we noticed a theme here, incredibly beautiful and peaceful gardens and landscaping. We hit the landmark just as some tour groups were arriving and it still stands at the top of my list despite all that.

We then went to the Ninjo Castle on our way back into town. My new entry into the list of World’s Worst Jobs is now and ancient Japanese Emporer. Sure you get to rule a wicked country and live in a castle, but your house in surrounded by a moat, which is surrounded by a huge stone block wall, which is surrounded by the samurai posts, which is surrounded by another huge wall with lookout towers, which is then surrounded by an even larger moat. I can’t imagine whoever the emporer was, got to go out for a morning jog through town. Yikes.

It was pretty cool, though. We got to walk thorugh the main ‘greeting’ building (I guess it would be called). The most memorable thing was walking on the meadow lark boards. This is the special flooring set on some kind of nail contraptions that when stepped on it sounded just like a bird chirping. This was invented/used as a line of defense against the ninjas that were more than stealth-like, but still had to walk. They would step on the floor, birds would chirp alerting the samurai of the ninjas, and they would defend the castle. Wicked, eh?

Later on that evening, we were wandering downtown in search of some affordable food. I was trying to decipher the plastic food on display everywhere, when I looked up and was face to face with a geisha. I read in the guidebook that they can still be seen in Kyoto and some tips to follow if you do run into them. I dismissed this possibility because of the weather. Sure enough, and this was a working geisha, not just a tourist done up as a geisha,either. She was carrying a tray of something, and popped out one of those old paper umbrellas just after she passed. Once I got my wits about me, she ducked into a doorway and was gone. How cool is that, though?

I promised that I wouldn’t get templed out, but that’s exactly what happened. Kyoto got the best of us in many regards. We saw more temples than we could have imagined, and we still didn’t get to them all (or even half of them), we slept Japanese style in this town of old, we strolled cobblestone streets as they could have been millennia ago, and witnessed one of the dwindling geishas that have survived for so long. Kyoto has fulfilled me of being the Japan I’ve seen in the movies, the Japan I’ve read about, the Japan I’ve only imagined.

Now, if the Typhoon isn’t too bad, we’re off to the bright lights of Japan’s city of the future, Tokyo!

Arigato Goisaimas!

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Photos

Cemetary, crazy big, it looked like a miniature city
on the path to another temple