So it has been a few days since I have had internet access because Dan and I were out of town, so this will hopefully be a good one. Unfortunately, I can not use any contractions because I can not figure out the apostrophe on this silly Japanese hotel computer and I am expecting to get kicked off at any moment when the front desk closes, so we will see how this goes.
On May 1st, I went by myself to the Tokyo Edo museum. It was really interesting. Tokyo was called Edo until the 1800s when it became the capital as a result of a Tokugawa becoming emperor (they were from Edo). Before that, Kyoto had been the capital for a really long time. So Tokyo went from being a rural village to being the monstrosity it is today in very short order. Most people would not realize how long Tokyo has been quite Westernized, but if you look at the dioramas at the museum, some of the models of Tokyo streetscapes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, look like Victorian London. You can't see any of that in Tokyo now though, since all the brick buildings were knocked down in two earthquakes early in the last century, and all (or most of) the traditional Japanese wooden ones stayed standing.
After the museum I did a little shopping and had more conveyor belt sushi, yum! Although, I think one of the foods on the conveyor belt was brain, I didn't eat it, but I was wishing I could ask what it was. After that I stopped in to write some postcards at the old west themed restaurant with the confederate flag outside and the wagon wheel. They played the Beverly Hillbillies themesong the whole time I was there, very funny. I met Dan after work and we went to the Beer Blast and more Karaoke.
One May 2nd, Dan and I took the bullet train (shinkansen) to Takayama - it really is so fast and we didn't even take the fastest one. We ate dinner at a restaurant in Takayama that was 90 years old. The roof beams were enormous tree trunks. It's in the mountains (called the Japanese Alps) so they developed a special form of architecture for the roofs because of the weight of the snow - the style is called "praying hands" because the roof pitch is so steep. Anyway, at the restaurant we sat on tatami mats on the floor and ate mountain vegetables, a local specialty, delicious.
On May 3rd, we went to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, called Hida No Sato, a pioneer village type deal where they rescued houses from all over the Hida region and moved them to one spot so people could see them. It was really cool, they had people giving displays of their craft, like shingle making, and they were growing rice and the houses had fires in their hearths. It was very Last Samurai, right down to the mountain location (although I'm told that the Last Samurai was filmed in New Zealand).
Next we went to the main church of this crazy Japanese doomsday cult. It seems stupid I know, but we survived and no one made us drink any poisoned Kool-aid, so it must have been OK after all. Actually when they asked us to write down our names on the way in, Dan and I both put fake names. I wrote Margaret Atwood and Dan wrote Atom Egoyan - so my apologies Margaret Atwood if a Japanese cult tries to recruit you!
For lunch, we ate 110 year old soba noodles, well the restaurant was 110 years old, the noodles seemed fresh enough. Soba is a local specialty of the region along with mountain vegetables and Hida beef which is one of the top grades of beef in the world, up there with Kobe beef - which I ate on sticks from street vendors every time I passed them. After lunch, we went on a walking tour and came upon some kind of traditional parade for "Boy's Day" which is May 5th. We walked up the mountain to the ruins of a castle of the Kanmori clan - what a hike, you'd have to be pretty fit to attack that castle. We both thought we were going to drop dead from exhaustion. We ate dinner at a restaurant that served those mountain vegetables and that beef, over a pot of fire on your table and you cooked your food on a magnolia leaf with sweet miso. I have to say it didn't look like any magnolia leaf I've ever seen, but the food was tasty.
On May 4th, we visited the only surviving Tokugawa shogunate administrative office and a shrine with a 1200 year old ginko tree in the courtyard - my fortune there said "little good luck" but after my last 7 bad fortunes, I was ready to take what I could get. We ate Takayama ramen for lunch - every region has a ramen (noodle) specialty dish. Then I took the shinkansen to Kyoto and a weird commuter subway to Nara and Dan went back to Tokyo to work the next day. In Nara, I stayed in a traditional inn called a Ryokan and the room is a tatami room where you sleep on a Japanese futon on the floor. It's really quite comfortable, the public bathing though, well let's just say I decided I'd rather be dirty. I had a late dinner at a restaurant that serves Nara local specialties like sushi wrapped in Persimmon leaves and a river fish called Ayu, which is supposedly so soft you can eat every part of it from head to tail without deboning it. I didn't realize when I ordered it though that they were going to cut the whole fish in half put it on a roll of sushi rice and cut it into 5 sections and bring it to me. The head was it's own piece of sushi. I debated about it, and then I just ate it, the head was a bit crunchy, but otherwise it was OK.
After dinner, I took a vacation from my vacation and went to a British style pub called Rumours where they have a picture on the wall of the time the Beatles visited Japan.
I'm shrined-out, I'm craving American TV and without Dan, the language barrier has lead to some funny situations, like when I tried to buy notepaper to rough out this blog before paying for computer time. So I looked up the word for paper and went into a store and asked for it, showed her the phrase book where it was written in Japanese and then we went through a mime of all the various kinds of paper - luckily I already knew the word for toilet, so we didn't have to mime that one. As it ended up, I'm roughing this out on the paper bag from some postcards I bought, but at least it's not on toilet paper.
Anyway, tomorrow, I'm planning a guided tour of the Geisha district of Kyoto and the next day if all goes according to plan, I'll be dressed up as a Geisha and go out for a walk in the Geisha district.
On May 1st, I went by myself to the Tokyo Edo museum. It was really interesting. Tokyo was called Edo until the 1800s when it became the capital as a result of a Tokugawa becoming emperor (they were from Edo). Before that, Kyoto had been the capital for a really long time. So Tokyo went from being a rural village to being the monstrosity it is today in very short order. Most people would not realize how long Tokyo has been quite Westernized, but if you look at the dioramas at the museum, some of the models of Tokyo streetscapes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, look like Victorian London. You can't see any of that in Tokyo now though, since all the brick buildings were knocked down in two earthquakes early in the last century, and all (or most of) the traditional Japanese wooden ones stayed standing.
After the museum I did a little shopping and had more conveyor belt sushi, yum! Although, I think one of the foods on the conveyor belt was brain, I didn't eat it, but I was wishing I could ask what it was. After that I stopped in to write some postcards at the old west themed restaurant with the confederate flag outside and the wagon wheel. They played the Beverly Hillbillies themesong the whole time I was there, very funny. I met Dan after work and we went to the Beer Blast and more Karaoke.
One May 2nd, Dan and I took the bullet train (shinkansen) to Takayama - it really is so fast and we didn't even take the fastest one. We ate dinner at a restaurant in Takayama that was 90 years old. The roof beams were enormous tree trunks. It's in the mountains (called the Japanese Alps) so they developed a special form of architecture for the roofs because of the weight of the snow - the style is called "praying hands" because the roof pitch is so steep. Anyway, at the restaurant we sat on tatami mats on the floor and ate mountain vegetables, a local specialty, delicious.
On May 3rd, we went to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, called Hida No Sato, a pioneer village type deal where they rescued houses from all over the Hida region and moved them to one spot so people could see them. It was really cool, they had people giving displays of their craft, like shingle making, and they were growing rice and the houses had fires in their hearths. It was very Last Samurai, right down to the mountain location (although I'm told that the Last Samurai was filmed in New Zealand).
Next we went to the main church of this crazy Japanese doomsday cult. It seems stupid I know, but we survived and no one made us drink any poisoned Kool-aid, so it must have been OK after all. Actually when they asked us to write down our names on the way in, Dan and I both put fake names. I wrote Margaret Atwood and Dan wrote Atom Egoyan - so my apologies Margaret Atwood if a Japanese cult tries to recruit you!
For lunch, we ate 110 year old soba noodles, well the restaurant was 110 years old, the noodles seemed fresh enough. Soba is a local specialty of the region along with mountain vegetables and Hida beef which is one of the top grades of beef in the world, up there with Kobe beef - which I ate on sticks from street vendors every time I passed them. After lunch, we went on a walking tour and came upon some kind of traditional parade for "Boy's Day" which is May 5th. We walked up the mountain to the ruins of a castle of the Kanmori clan - what a hike, you'd have to be pretty fit to attack that castle. We both thought we were going to drop dead from exhaustion. We ate dinner at a restaurant that served those mountain vegetables and that beef, over a pot of fire on your table and you cooked your food on a magnolia leaf with sweet miso. I have to say it didn't look like any magnolia leaf I've ever seen, but the food was tasty.
On May 4th, we visited the only surviving Tokugawa shogunate administrative office and a shrine with a 1200 year old ginko tree in the courtyard - my fortune there said "little good luck" but after my last 7 bad fortunes, I was ready to take what I could get. We ate Takayama ramen for lunch - every region has a ramen (noodle) specialty dish. Then I took the shinkansen to Kyoto and a weird commuter subway to Nara and Dan went back to Tokyo to work the next day. In Nara, I stayed in a traditional inn called a Ryokan and the room is a tatami room where you sleep on a Japanese futon on the floor. It's really quite comfortable, the public bathing though, well let's just say I decided I'd rather be dirty. I had a late dinner at a restaurant that serves Nara local specialties like sushi wrapped in Persimmon leaves and a river fish called Ayu, which is supposedly so soft you can eat every part of it from head to tail without deboning it. I didn't realize when I ordered it though that they were going to cut the whole fish in half put it on a roll of sushi rice and cut it into 5 sections and bring it to me. The head was it's own piece of sushi. I debated about it, and then I just ate it, the head was a bit crunchy, but otherwise it was OK.
After dinner, I took a vacation from my vacation and went to a British style pub called Rumours where they have a picture on the wall of the time the Beatles visited Japan.
I'm shrined-out, I'm craving American TV and without Dan, the language barrier has lead to some funny situations, like when I tried to buy notepaper to rough out this blog before paying for computer time. So I looked up the word for paper and went into a store and asked for it, showed her the phrase book where it was written in Japanese and then we went through a mime of all the various kinds of paper - luckily I already knew the word for toilet, so we didn't have to mime that one. As it ended up, I'm roughing this out on the paper bag from some postcards I bought, but at least it's not on toilet paper.
Anyway, tomorrow, I'm planning a guided tour of the Geisha district of Kyoto and the next day if all goes according to plan, I'll be dressed up as a Geisha and go out for a walk in the Geisha district.
2 comments:
hey jenni,
hope you are having some geisha-tastic fun in kyoto.
i forgot to tell you that if you are still in nara, there is a good place to get okonomiyake, just inside to the right of the convered shopping arcade off sanjo-dori.
if you've already moved onto kyoto, don't worry 'cause hiroshima famous food is okonomiyake, so there'll be plenty of places to try it there
In case you were all curious, I was too weirded out by the A-bomb stuff to eat anything in Hiroshima, I just got back on the train and ate some of the pasteries I'd bought that morning for lunch. Also all those people in the museum in Hiroshima with their skin hanging off and their Kimono patterns burned into their skin - does nothing at all for the appetite.
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