Mrs Bananas "Restaurant"

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I decide to go for an early morning wander. It seems that not much happens in Kyoto early on a Sunday morning. Very few shops are open, and there are hardly any people on the street. The one exception is a massive queue out into the street outside the local betting agency. I hadn’t thought of the Japanese as being big gamblers, but it seems that I may have been mistaken.

I walk through a park back towards the hotel. It is noisy and I see that one of the gardeners is armed with a leaf blower, and is busily trying to relocate some errant leaves. I am suddenly reminded of home. Our manic next door neighbour back in Melbourne uses his leaf blower every day, sometimes two or three times, sometimes during hurricanes, and sometimes at 7am on a Sunday morning. It drives us all insane. We came half way around the world to try to escape his incessant din, only to find the same noise again here early on a Sunday morning in Kyoto. I begin to wonder if our manic next door neighbour might be stalking us. If so, he’s very well disguised. The weather here in Kyoto also reminds us of home. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get from one day to the next. It was 28 degrees the day we arrived here, but only 14 degrees yesterday, and it’s anyone’s guess what it’s going to be today.

We get on the train and head towards Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. This is probably the most well-known shrine in Kyoto, mostly due to its famed orange torii gates. We get off the train and are immediately confronted by a seething mass of humanity. We’ve found it a lot less crowded here in Japan than what we’d been led to expect. We were told before we left home that the most important Japanese word we had to learn was the one that means "excuse me", because we’d be constantly bumping into and tripping over people wherever we went, and then needing to apologise. This hasn’t been the case at all up until now, but it does now feel like half of Japan must be here today. We move slowly with the seething mass along the one narrow street from the station to the Shrine.

We decide to grab some lunch before tackling the Shrine, and get a table at a small cafe. There are four people about our age sitting on tatami mats on the floor next to us. They are eating their meals on very low tables, and they are sitting with their legs completely folded underneath them. I couldn’t sit like that when I was ten years old, let alone now. I wonder if Japanese people are genetically predisposed to having knee joints that can bend 180 degrees.

The Shrine is spectacular. We read that it was founded in 711, and the current structure dates from 1499. It includes more than ten thousand torii gates along a four kilometre path leading up the side of a mountain. I‘ve seen lots of photos of this place, and I suspect that most of the world’s noted photographers have been here at some stage. The only photos I’ve seen before however don’t have any people in them, only the gates themselves. I wonder how the world’s noted photographers have managed this. You‘d be waiting a very long time to get a photo without any people in it here today. Maybe the world’s noted photographers have enough clout to get the Shrine closed for a few hours while they perform their handiwork. I suspect it might be a fairly short conversation if I went to the Shrine’s office and asked if they could move everyone out of the way for an hour or so so that I could take some happy snaps.

Issy is a bit templed out, so she goes back to the hotel for a break while I move onto the next destination, which is the village of Arashiyma on the western outskirts of Kyoto. I get off the train, walk across a long bridge across the river, and then head off upstream along the river bank into Arashiyama Park. It seems that the river is a popular hot spot for young Japanese blokes trying to impress their girlfriends with their rowing skills. The views of the river from a lookout at the top of the gorge in the park are excellent. Next stop is the famed Arashiyama bamboo grove. This is stunning. I walk through to the end of the grove and into the massive UNESCO World Heritage Tenryu-ji Buddhist Temple, which I read was completed in 1345. The temple is set in spectacular gardens, with streams and ponds, and a lot of carefully raked stones.

We noticed earlier in the day that there seemed to be a lot of restaurants on the banks of the river in downtown Kyoto, so we head there in search of somewhere to eat. The alleyway next to the river is wall to wall restaurants, and we pick one of the very few which has a menu that we can understand. We decide to pass on the "daggertooth pike conger fish", which looks a bit too much like a piraña for our liking, and settle instead on some more traditional fare.

One of the slightly frustrating things about trying to chose a restaurant here is that there’s usually no outside seating, and a lot them don’t have windows. This makes it a bit hard to know what a place is going to be like until you get inside, and it’s sometimes then a bit of a surprise. On the way here through the restaurant precinct we passed a group of establishments called Hot Point, Hot Point Part 2, and Mrs Bananas, all in the same alleyway close to the river. They all looked alright from the outside, and we nearly went into one them, but moved on only because we were a bit confused by the menus. They all seemed to be selling either 30, 45 or 60 items for set prices, but it wasn’t all that clear to us exactly what the items were, because the menus were all in Japanese. We assumed they were probably small servings of a variety of dishes such as pieces of sashimi. As we sit waiting for our meals to arrive we decide to research this a bit further. The Google machine tells us that we may have got more than a bit of a surprise if we’d gone into Mrs Bananas in search of a bit of sashimi. It seems that 30, 45 and 60 weren’t referring to the numbers of servings, but rather to the numbers of minutes that you could purchase of a young lady’s time, and the menu, well, umm ....., suffice to say that the Google translator has had a bit of difficulty with some of the items.

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