Sunday, August 5, 2012
Berlin hotel booked!
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Countdown to Germany-Austria-Slovakia, Summer 2012
I fly back to Salt Lake City on the 7th, just in time for a week-long visit from my mother and step-father. Everything is set. We've got our passports up-to-date, backpacks ready, eurail and plane tickets purchased, cameras primed. I'll be posting reports on this page occasionally.
Friday, January 15, 2010
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Friday, January 8, 2010
Brief Update: Home
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Last Day in Kyoto
We woke up on the sixth feeling no worse for wear from the previous day’s rigors. We were scheduled to catch the Shinkansen at 2:00 back to Tokyo, but we had the whole morning to wrap up our Kyoto experience, so we packed up our backpacks and set out on foot to our first stop,
Higashi-Hongan-Ji, a temple with a large central building and a secondary shrine whose exterior was under construction. One of the central attractions of this shrine was supposed to be a large length of rope made entirely of human hair, which I suppose sounds sort of gross now that I think of it. Anyway, we didn’t get to see it, as that section of the temple was under construction. We did get to see some really nice golden friezes depicting Bodhisatvas. There was quite a few golden artifacts in this temple.
The next temple on our trek was Nishi-Hongan-ji, which sported a bigger complex, but to be perfectly frank, by this point in our Kyoto journey, we were all a little jaded on big temple complexes. I mean, we’d seen “the biggest bell”, “the biggest gate”, “the most golden”. What else could they throw at us that would be that impressive?
Well the last temple we visited was To-ji, which has – wait for it – “Japan’s largest Pagoda.” It is five levels, and very impressive. It’s not particularly flashy, but it is big. After the pagoda we went into some of the auxillary buildings, which held some priceless statues which were cooler than the actual pagoda, I think. Sadly we weren’t allowed to take photos of them. Afterwards we walked back to the train station, which actually turned out to be more impressive than we had initially thought. We ate lunch at a ramen shop on the 10th floor of the station complex then boarded the Shinkansen, which arrived precisely at the time on our tickets, and left 1 minute later.
On the return trip to Tokyo we passed through several towns and at least three climates. At one point, we entered a tunnel, which lasted all of about 10 seconds, and when we exited into a snow storm. We entered another tunnel 5 minutes later, and boom, no more snow. The highlight of the return trip, and something we didn’t manage to catch on the first Shinkansen trip, was seeing Mt. Fuji in all its snow-capped glory. Phil and Dustin snapped some pictures of it, so I’ll get those from him when we get back to the states.
When we got back to Tokyo, we took the subway back to the hotel and met back up with the rest of the group. Everyone was pretty tired, so we decided to stick around Shinjuku for the evening. We went out to the Lumine mall to a restaurant there that served mystery food on sticks. We all ate our fill, including grilled cherry tomatoes, chicken, heart, and liver (which was especially good). I also had a cucumber and ume plum salad that was really good. All of us had lots and lots of sake here. Dustin was completely plastered and the rest of us weren’t too far behind. We managed to walk most of it off on the trip back to the hotel though, where we promptly drank some more sake. Then we slept. Dustin promises I didn’t snore this time.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Kyoto: Shrine-a-thon
Two posts today. You should read the one before this (lower on the page) first.
Quick non-fact – Kyoto is home to over a million billion shrines. Some of them are the size of mailboxes. Some of them are the size of city blocks. Each is unique and brings something to the shrine table. Some of them are Shinto shrines with their elaborate gates, fox gods and fortune tellers. Others are Buddhist, with incense censures and candle houses, towering golden Buddhas and contemplative monks. Still others are a fashionable amalgam of the two. Shinto and Buddhism live hand-in-hand in Japan, creating a unique blend of religion and superstition.
Phil had quite an agenda set for the day, since we only had one full day in Kyoto within which we had to get a vast majority of our sight-seeing done. We started at the south end of the eastern Kyoto “shrine row”, at a temple complex called Kiyomizu-dera. The walk up into the foothills of Kyoto was rigorous, but the path to the complex led through the most exquisite graveyard, where offerings of flowers and incense, alcohol and food had been placed on family graves to honor the dead. It was a sea of graves.old and new; the rolling foothills were covered with them.
At the end of the path was Kiyomizu-dera, a temple complex that sports an impressive pagoda and several buildings. The main temple holds a hidden treasure that one pays 100 yen to see. Phil and I, curiosity piqued, paid the 100 yen, removed our shoes, and descended into darkness with our hands leading the way along a banister. This was darkness utter and complete, my friends. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before, save for being in a cave when they shut off the lights. This was different however; as it was very unexpected, and the passage we were traveling in was narrow, with stone floors and blind turns. We felt along the banister in the blackness for about 2 minutes, until the treasure was slowly revealed with a single light from above. It was a large circular stone with carvings in the middle, and it was the only thing one could make out in the blackness. The whole experience was very surreal. We only discovered after we left that the stone was supposed to be rotated clockwise and wished upon. Ah well.
The next stop along the way was not exactly scheduled, but as we were heading for the next stop, we saw signs for what we guessed was an impressively sized statue. Our suspicions were affirmed as we entered the grounds of the “Shrine to the Unknown Soldier”. The obvious attraction of this site is the 80 foot tall Bodhisatva that looms over the grounds.
Next was Kodai-ji, another Buddhist shrine that we had planned on visiting, but didn’t seem particularly impressive, and charged a high admission cost, so we skipped it.
We then headed back to Yasaka-Jinju, where the restaurant from the previous night was situated. Also there, which I did not mention in the previous post, is an enormous Shinto gate which straddles a staircase leading up to the grounds. A lot of these structures are hard to grasp, scale-wise, from pictures. We had to stand pretty far back from most of them to get them in frame for picture-taking. The temple at Yasaka-Jinju is otherwise not particularly noteworthy, other than being a big draw at New Years. Outside of the grounds we did find a nice collection of street food vendors, so we availed ourselves of lunch there. Phil and I decided to get some Indian tandoori and naan at a stall run by a really generous and amiable pair of Indian fellows, who spoke to us in precise English and guaranteed our enjoyment of their food. How could we say no, really? Anyway, it really was quite good. We then decided to try some more takoyaki, which has quickly become the snack-food du jour of the trip. We ate our fried squid dumplings in front of the food vendor that sold them to us, and after we finished them, they insisted we try, free of cost, their konyaku and beef stew. It was pretty decent, though konyaku is definitely an acquired texture. We thanked them profusely, bowing awkwardly, and rolled down the hill after a larger than expected lunch to the next shrine on our list.
The main feature of Choin-in, the next temple on our path, is a vast bell. The bell is so big, and so heavy, it takes seventeen priests working together to ring it. Sadly, it didn’t look like they would be dropping the hammer any time soon. Impressive bell though. Big. Iron. Very authoritative.
Next on the path was Heian-Jinji, which was a pretty standard large temple complex. We were unfortunately growing a little jaded by this point on large temple complexes. It’s important to note here that while I am pointing out the most memorable of our stops, we saw dozens more smaller shrines, some very pretty, but we are talking about a town where you can't throw a pebble without hitting a shrine.
The last complex on our pilgrimage was at the end of a 3ish kilometer hike along a gravel road called the “Philosopher’s path”. Apparently a noteworthy monk used to walk the path and contemplate the meaning of existence every morning or something along those lines, so we decided, arms folded behind our backs and tongues planted firmly in cheeks, to walk the path and discuss the nature of man as tabula rasa or noble savage. Also, my feet were about to rebel at this point and wander off on their own to find a tub to soak in, but people don’t want to hear about my physical short-comings, so onward!
The Ginkaku-ji, or “Silver Shrine” is so named not because it is covered in silver as the “Golden Shrine” is covered in gold, but because it’s not quite as nice as the golden shrine. It seems the 17th century Japanese were not entirely without a sense of humor. The one thing the Silver Shrine does have going for it, over the Golden Shrine, is its grounds, which are bigger, nicer, and more diverse. The grounds sport a very nice view of Kyoto, a few small waterfalls, a bamboo forest, and a zen rock garden that contains a huge near-geometrically perfect rick pile with a flat surface that is meant to represent Mt. Fuji.
By the time we had finished wandering the grounds of Ginkaku-ji, we estimated that we had walked at least 10 miles that day, and my feet could not handle the walk back, which was a good 3 or 4 additional kilometers. So we walked several blocks, and then hailed a taxi to get us back to the hotel. There we rested for an hour while our batteries charged enough to walk downstairs to the Chinese restaurant in the hotel.
The evening meal here is worthy of a mention too. Chinese food in Japan is not Chinese food in America. No sir. While there are some similarities, it is the difference between…well…let’s say a hamburger in the US and a hamburger anywhere else in the damn world. Chinese food in America is like a bad photocopy of real Chinese food – the impression is there, but it’s slightly over-exposed, and the image is kind of ugly. I managed to check off a few more things on my “list of food to try” here, including shark’s fin soup (it was good, like an upscale egg-drop with more complexity), and shou-chu, which is a distilled spirit popular in China and Japan with a very smooth mouth feel and a kick like a mule.
That night we all slept like the dead, having done more walking on this day than any given three days during the rest of the trip. Tomorrow we would wrap up Kyoto and take the Shinkansen back to Tokyo to meet up with Xavi and Shelly for the remaining 3 days of the journey.
Kyoto: The City of Shrines
Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes. They were received, and appreciated. I woke up at 5am feeling pretty good on my 30th birthday. Dustin, Phil and I were scheduled to catch the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo station at 7am and wanted to give ourselves ample time in case anything were to go not-so-according-to-plan on our way there. Things, it turns out, went not-so-according-to-plan almost right off the bat as we left the hotel to discover all of the auxiliary subway stops were closed at that time of the morning. So we had to hoof it to the main Shinjuku station entrance above ground instead of taking the nice, warm, slightly more direct tunnels. When we got to the station, we could not find the line we planned on taking to Tokyo station, the Marunuchi line. It turns out that line was almost all the way back towards our hotel just inside one of those closed auxiliary entrances. Luckily Phil has become some sort of Tokyo subway samurai, and got us onto another line which got us there in just about the same amount of time it would have taken on the other line. We got to Tokyo station with time to spare and snagged some breakfast at a convenience store while waiting for the train.
The Shinkansen is the fastest train in the world, and visually it accepts the challenge by looking like a gleaming white ground-based space shuttle. The Hidari line runs at an average of 270 kph from Tokyo to Shin-Osaka, and stops for about 1 minute in Kyoto. The ride was a little under 3 hours long, and is a very good length for writing blog entries…
Kyoto, on a large scale, is not as awe-inspiring as Tokyo. It’s sort of a brown city, mixing old style Japanese buildings and Sky rises, without the glamour and bustle of Tokyo. The joy of Kyoto comes from the sheer number of shrines and monuments. These hidden treasures pepper Kyoto but are often difficult to catch from a glance at the skyline.
The two easily spotted landmarks are the Kyoto Tower, an absolutely horrible piece of modern architecture that scars the city line. It looks like the Space Needle in Seattle, only much much uglier. The other noteworthy skyline feature is the To-ji pagoda, the largest in Japan, which we did in fact visit. But more on that later.
Day 1 in Kyoto started with a taxi ride to the north side of Kyoto to see its most spectacular shrine, Kinkaku-ji, the golden shrine. This moniker is not just a flashy title. The shrine at Kinkaku-ji is made of gold. We arrived at the temple with the perfect lighting conditions, and the shrine was glowing from the sunlight, creating a magnificent reflection in the pool below it. We circled the shrine along a path through the manicured grounds (there were at least two monks sweeping the forest at the entrance, I kid you not), then left that temple and caught a taxi back into central Kyoto for our next stop, Nijo-jo.
Nijo-jo is a castle that the Shogunate created in the 17th century when the military and the emperor were rattling sabers at each other. They say in the brochure that it is bigger and better appointed than the actual Imperial Palace at Kyoto, which is not open to the public at any time. It is a very large complex, with intricate gardens, ponds, and is home to various giant koi and some huge king herons, who more or less ignored our presence. The gardens are supposed to be extra impressive during the spring, when the cherry and plum blossoms are fully in bloom.
Unfortunately we picked the wrong day to visit the castle, as the actual interior space of the castle proper, which is supposed to be pretty impressive, was closed for New Years. It was going to be open the next day, but we had already paid admission before we discovered this, and as you’ll see in the next blog post, January 5th was a very long day, even without the castle.
After Nijo castle we walked into downtown Kyoto and checked into our hotel. We’d been carrying our small day-trip bags through the sites thus far, so it was nice to unload our crap and sit for a few minutes before heading out again.
The first stop after our hotel intermission was the Kyoto food market. We managed to stay our wallets and stomachs, knowing that that evening we had a special meal planned, but let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. There was a smorgasbord of food vendors selling everything from mochi cakes to roasted chestnuts to fried tofu on a stick. The crowds were big, but nowhere near the throngs of the Tokyo streets.
As the afternoon progressed we made our way to Gion, the Geisha district, which straddles the Kyoto quay at the river. Gion is representative of the old style of Japanese apartments, and is also the neighborhood where the Geishas used to ply their trade heavily, pre-World War II. Many of the shops were still closed for New Years, but as the sun went down, we managed to get a pretty decent impression of the neighborhood. We even managed to spy one geisha in a tea shop, serving her clients with the traditional demur of her training.
Our last stop of the evening was a restaurant very near Yasaka-jinju, one of the shrines we would visit on the following day. The restaurant specializes in a popular style of Kyoto cuisine called Kaiseki, which is an eighteen course meal that usually accompanies the traditional tea ceremony. It turns out that to experience the true full Kaiseki we needed to make reservations (thanks for dropping the ball on that one, Rough Guides) but we were allowed to have a shortened version that ended up being more food than we could eat anyway. We started the meal by removing our shoes and awkwardly attempting to sit in the kneeling position customary in that style of restaurant. Having not practiced sitting in that way since childhood like the Japanese guests that frequent the restaurant, we were squirming within minutes and had to settle for the less elegant cross-legged alternative. The highlight of the meal came early on, with the restaurants specialty of tea-soaked dried cod and yam. It was profoundly good. The fish had a unique and complex flavor, and the bones were so tender after the drying and reconstituting, that you could eat them along with the fish without even noticing them. The rest of the meal consisted of tempura, tofu sashimi, mocha rolls, three kinds of soups and some other dishes I can’t even remember at this point. It was definitely an unforgettable birthday dinner.
Afterward we bought some sake and beer and waddled back to the hotel room where we rested for the next day, which I would like to call “Shrine-a-thon 2010.”