Yet Another Japan Post

It occurs to me that travelogues are primarily interesting to the person giving them. This is one of the things I find so fascinating about travel--you can't really share. Photos and videos are nice, I guess, but there's just nothing to compare with the heady cocktail of excitement, nervousness, tiredness, and just plain being there that one can only get first-hand. On that note, I'm probably going to stop doing Japan trip posts after this one.

I have vastly more photos and videos than I've posted, but despite my considering them very interesting, I imagine that most others do not. So, in keeping with the general theme of travel-posts-as-narcissism, all of today's photos will be pictures of me.

The first one was taken in the gardens in front of the old imperial palace in Kyoto. It's a very nice palace; its main downside is that, being built entirely of wood, it has a habit of burning down all the time. As such, it's fairly new. The palace buildings themselves are very nice--they build the roofs out of a special kind of cedar tree bark, which is great for natural air conditioning. The roofs are fairly hardy as untreated wood goes, but they do need to be replaced every 20-30 years. The inner gardens are beautiful as well.

Speaking of gardens, the silver shrine has, I think, the nicest. The golden shrine gets its reputation from being plated in gold, whereas the silver shrine's silver plating was one of those good intentions that ended up disappearing in the face of a wartime budget (something medieval). Despite never having been plated in silver in its entire history, the name stuck. To make up for the lack of metallic sparkle, the shrine goes all-out on their large gardens. There is both a zen rock garden, which consists of big piles of rocks raked into razor-sharp precise shapes, and then grounds filled with flowers, carefully sculpted trees, rivers, and colorful bushes.

Incidentally, the silver shrine is generally famous as a cultural development center. Among other things, this shrine's culture is largely responsible for the development of the tea ceremony and flower arranging as quasi-religious experiences in Japan.

The final picture shows me outfitted in full tourist regalia--camera pouch, sweatshirt tied around the waist, and water bottle in hand. Most of my wardrobe isn't fashionable enough to compete with your average Japanese person, and I didn't really try. In the background is the Fushimi Inari Taisha, or at least a miniscule part of it--there is a large main shrine, dedicated to the fox-god of rice and prosperity, and that's not it. This photo was taken in front of one of the thousands of small shrines lining the trails. The trails are probably several miles all told, most of which are bridged by large orange shinto gates. At first this is impressive, but after hiking up the steep trail for a while, it blurs into kind of an orange haze. This shrine will punish you for slacking on your exercise program, it seems.

By the way, those little statues off to the side are, in fact, frogs wearing bibs. I'm not sure which god this is, but I asked about the bibs, and they really are bibs for eating. Since Japanese gods are frequently given gifts of food, I guess there is probably some relation between the bibs and the offerings.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm never going to get over the jet-lag if I don't go to bed. So good night all, and thanks for tolerating the travelogue. The videos were a bit too big to post, but if you're curious, try to catch me sometime when I'm near my laptop. I have a walking tour of some underground tunnels, baby dolphins, close encounters with a whale shark, cute children feeding deer, juggling, and panoramic shots of both an 11-floor train station and downtown Osaka. I think they're cool, but who knows -- maybe I'm just biased.

We're in Kyoto!

First observation about Kyoto: It is much easier to find coin-operated laundromats here. I am not sure why this is, but there are lots of them. Next observation: There are these large, amazing shrines all over the place. After putting on our laundry, we found a big complex less than a block away. Then walked past another one holding some kind of carnival on the way back. All told, I think we walked past half a dozen or so shrines today.

So, it is possible to take a bullet train from Osaka to Kyoto. Indeed, we actually passed through Kyoto on our way to Nagoya about a week ago. It's worth observing, however, that on a bullet train, the distance between Osaka and Kyoto is maybe ten minutes. Which is to say, it's not very far. So, figuring we'd save some money to spend on food or books or something, we bought regular tickets, and loaded up all our luggage onto a regular old train. The train was packed, which meant we had to stand for forty-five minutes, but we arrived in Kyoto a little footsore and about fifty bucks richer--the tickets for the both of us cost (roughly) twelve dollars on the regular express train.

We bought breakfast in the train station. Rachel had a big old sushi/onigiri tray, and she bought me a bag of bread sticks while I watched the luggage. Add in a carton of milk each, and voila: breakfast. It left us a little full for lunch, so we just grabbed snacks from a Circle-K across from the laundromat. Combie [convenience-store] food is a little predictable and processed, but since we're tourists, it's still new and interesting. I ended up with some kind of cream cheese/caramel concoction and a Calpis water (a lightly sweetened milky-white soda), while Rachel had some kind of tapioca-strawberry milk and some manner of bread.

I forgot to dig my camera out the luggage before we went exploring Kyoto, so all the photos on this post are actually from yesterday, when we went to Nara. The first one is Rachel pretending that she's holding something to catch the deer's attention--they sell special crackers formulated for feeding deer. They seem to like them, but these are some of the fattest deer you've met--they get a bit overloaded sometimes. The second one is a picture of Todaiji from the outside. I was told by our friend who met us in Nara that it is the largest wooden structure in the world. This seems possible; those little white specks just below the door are the people standing around, waiting to enter. The building contains a really large statue of Buddha (not the world's biggest, but it's up there), and various other very large statues as well.

After visiting the statue, we were joined by some of our friend's family members, which is where we have this third photo from (I'm leaving out stuff for privacy reasons; if you ask me in person, I have more photos and videos). This is a little boy who was taking a picture of his aunt. I thought he was kind of cute, handling the gigantic camera, so I took a picture of him. His aunt, struck by the general humor of the situation, in turn took a picture of me taking a picture of him. It was one of those recursive moments.

As three-year-olds are wont to do, he got a bit tired and cranky after a while, so our guides headed home. Rachel got some more photos of manhole covers--there are lots of neat ones, many of them colored--and we shopped around for souvenirs. Eventually, we headed back to Osaka, and since we went past Dotonbori, I decided to stop and try get a night-time shot of the big central area.

Dotonbori is something like Osaka's Times Square, and fittingly for the city, it is all about shopping and restaurants. There is a mind-blowing number of shops here--they just go on for block after block, thousands of stores of all different types. The nicest of the shopping arcades have rain shields over the top, creating a weird, hybrid indoor/outdoor feel to the place, something you can only pull off with year-round pleasant weather. This advertisement of the running guy is one of the classic symbols of Osaka. It's an ad for a candy company, who appear to have gotten really lucky with the popularity of this ad. The advertising in this area is entertaining and over the top -- huge animatronic crabs, dragons, drum-playing clowns, giant octopuses wielding cleavers, that kind of thing.

We spent ... quite a lot of money here.

Aquariums and Sundays

Despite it being the single most- photographed thing I've done on the trip so far, I somehow managed to completely miss mentioning the Kaiyukan in my last post. We've been going at a pace of about two tourist attractions a day, which is pretty exhausting but fun.

Kaiyukan is the name of a really big aquarium found in Osaka. It is themed around the ring of fire, and has a lot of fish in it. This is actually my second time going, and I was sad to realize that after the first time, the only photo I have of the first time is of a block of acrylic glass that's on display. I repented, and now have an enormous number of photos and videos of fish. I've included one where I'm hanging out with some jellyfish, thanks to the magic of acrylic glass.

Another highlight of Friday was eating Okonomiyaki for dinner. The traditional okonomiyaki involves putting it together yourself and cooking it at your own table. Apparently, this ideal is a little too free-form for most Japanese restaurants, so they find various ways to subvert it. In this case, the okonomiyaki was delivered to our in-table grill fully cooked, ready for sauces to be stuck on top. The grill itself was only slightly warm, and really just served as a way of keeping the food hot. This isn't really a complaint though--this stuff was amazingly delicious. I had some kind of pork/noodle/cabbage mix that was great with soy sauce, and Rachel's was a squid/onion mix that tasted good with mayonnaise.

It was a bit interesting trying to find church -- there are only a handful of wards in Osaka proper, and they don't exactly locate the buildings in the major tourist centers. After fighting with lds.org a bit, which insists on giving driving directions, we figured out a method of getting to church that involved a bit of walking. It ended up being not too bad--we did need to walk ten blocks, but these ended up being very short blocks. I'll also note that most streets in Japan are narrow -- I think I might be able to jump between sidewalks with a good running start. Maybe I'd have to get in slightly better shape first, though. The photo here was taken as we approached the church building.

Church was good, and I found I was able to follow along with the testimonies and the lessons pretty well, which is great progress. I'm still missing a lot, but at least I can follow along. Lots of members and an investigator or two kept us company, and the ward has a friendly, family-like feel, a point mentioned in a few of the testimonies. Several people expressed surprise that I hadn't served a mission in Japan, and subsequently wondered how I'd manage to learn the language; I guess that's a compliment.

While we still needed food and travel, we did our level best to only mildly crack the sabbath, and spent much of Sunday in our room or walking around the neighborhood. I've also used some of the time to update the last few blog posts with long-promised pictures; if you've already read them, you can run back through and browse. While walking around, we did run into an honest-to-goodness grocery store (something like Macey's), so we'll definitely be heading down there tomorrow to load up on candy and so forth. Bye for now!