Change In Plans

Feeding monkeys on Monkey Mountain

This post is about our too-short visit to Kyoto.  We feel like we have seen and done a lot, but wish we had a couple more days.  Instead, we leave for Delhi in the morning.

We arrived from Tokyo on the bullet train (shin-kansen) yesterday afternoon.  I was amazed that the inter-city trains leave Tokyo station, pretty full, every 10-20 minutes all day long.  It was very easy, even with all of our luggage, to get tickets, board the train, and get settled.  As goes without saying in Japan, the train departed on schedule precisely at 11:20 am and arrived on schedule precisely at 1:41 pm.

After we checked into our hotel in Kyoto, and ate in a (bad) noodle shop for lunch, it was too late to take the 40-minute ride out to Monkey Mountain, which had been the original plan.  Instead, we searched for a U.S.-friendly cash machine for a long time, and then got dropped off in the Gion District.  For the last 1,000 years, Gion has been the entertainment and leisure center of Kyoto.  Traditionally, this entertainment has included geishas, so seeing them is part of the reason that tourists mill around with cameras, waiting for something to happen.

There are only 190 geishas left, with perhaps an equal number of geishas in training.  We didn’t realize that spotting geishas on the street is a little like seeing lions on a game drive while on safari.  It is expected, but still uncommon enough that a crowd gathers and hundreds of photos are taken.  We saw six geishas yesterday, not including a tall Western male transvestite who was also tottering around Gion with all of the kit on.  That was a little difficult to explain to our eight-year-old son. 

The cultural significance, and the appeal of the geisha is still a little lost on me, but it plugs directly into the strange repressive/suggestive role of sex in Japanese society. 

After our successful sunset geisha spotting, we walked back to the hotel along the Kamo River.  All four of us were exhausted from our time in Tokyo, and were asleep (without dinner) by 7:15 pm.

This morning we hired a professional guide, Ms. Kana Nakagima, who took us around on a rapid tour of this ancient and hugely historic city.  When we scheduled our time in Kyoto, we did not realize that today was National Culture Day.  Touring the shrines and temples of Kyoto on Culture Day is a little like dropping in at the Vatican on Easter Sunday.  Apparently Kyoto receives 49 million visitors  every year (!), and it seemed that about 20% of them were around today.

We started the day at the Golden Pavilion, which was constructed in 1220 as the country villa for one of the shoguns.  In 1394, the third shogun of Ashikaga abdicated the throne and devoted the rest of his life to making this villa a “breathtaking site of peace and serenity.”  After this ex-shogun died, the villa was converted into a Buddhist temple.  The grounds and the buildings are breathtaking, but the peace and serenity probably come on less crowded days.   Having Ms. Nakajima there to give us background and details was hugely helpful in appreciating the site.  For example, she pointed out a tree that looked pretty much like a tree.  Turn out that it was planted 600 years ago, and has been shaped over time by bonsai artists to look like a sailboat.  The boat is sailing west (always the direction of Buddhist paradise), across an ocean of carefully selected white pebbles, toward the Golden Pavilion.  We would have never picked up any of that stuff on our own.

From the Golden Pavilion we went out to Monkey Mountain, which may be the highlight of the trip to date for our kids.  We had to walk for about 2 kilometers along a foot path, climbing nearly 800 feet, and reading a lot of signs that made no sense in English (eg, “Do not feed monkeys on the outside!”).  As we neared the top, we started seeing and hearing lots of monkeys.  We came on small building with chain-link fence for walls, and 20 or so people on the inside, feeding monkeys on the outside.  It seemed strange that the people were caged while the animals ran around, but it is a good system.  The monkeys are very aggressive, but know that they can only get food through the fence.  Otherwise they would terrorize every person walking on the paths. We bought bags of apples and sweet potatoes, and fed the monkeys for a while.  The babies were unbelievably cute.  Even on the outside, we saw the monkeys up close -grooming, running around, fighting loudly, making up- which the kids thought was just great.

On the way back toward Kyoto proper, we stopped at Nijo Castle, which was the part-time residence of some of the 17th century Shoguns when they were in Kyoto.  The interior walls of the castle were made of paper, and many of the roofs were thatched, neither of which seemed ideal for a secure environment.  It turns out that the Shoguns used clever means of protection (in addition to high stone walls and a moat on the outside of the castle).  The castle floors, called “Nightingale Floors” all squeaked when walked upon, to alert guards of movement.  The bodyguards were not allowed to sit with the Shogun during meetings, but stared at bowls of water that would vibrate if anyone moved suddenly.  If the water vibrated, they ran in with swords drawn.  Cool castle.

Finally, we paid to have a formal tea ceremony in a tea shop in the center of town.  Tallulah really liked the formality and the gear, although none of us cared much for the taste of the frothy green tea.  The ceremony took about 30 minutes, was very solemn, and gave us at least a little insight into some part of Japanese culture.

This evening we had a big and formal dinner at a famous ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn.  This was an amazing experience, but requires another entire blog posting to do it justice.

On to Delhi!