spiderpig | Nihon e ikimashou! Day 5

So my previous post stopped after my mad wild chase after maiko and geiko didn't it?

We ended up taking a bus back to Gojo Street and trying to find our way back to our respective hostels in the dark. Slightly disconcerting. After taking baths and everything we were ready to sleep!

Very comfortable though. Tulips are nice to sleep on.

We take a slow walk to Kyoto Station and since I had barely slept I bought a can of bad tasting coffee. Kids, don't buy rainbow coffee. It takes exactly like a rainbow and exactly how coffee shouldn't taste like. Apparently we're early and we hang around Mister Donut and chow down on curry pan and other donuts. Yan Wen arrives slightly late and with him at the table I scoot off to the tourist information centre to find out how to get to the Nintendo Headquarters.

Before I rant about the Nintendo Headquarters, I have to mention this rather... crazy old guy sitting at the table behind ours. He was talking to himself and doing weird hand actions - so weird to the extent that I was like "zomg Aum Shirinkyo member!!" comically to the rest.

'slike okay, I walk into the tourist information centred armed with the street name that the Headquarters is on and I proceed to ~~harrass~~ ask the staff about how to get to the street. I actually made the whole office go slightly nuts in trying to help me out. Gah, so embarrassing. Turns out that Kotaku.com gave the wrong street name (CURSE YOU!) which caused even greater confusion. Still, I managed to wrestle the location of the building out from the staff members together with a map (the poor lady kept on telling me that I couldn't go into the building and I kept saying that it didn't matter hahaha).

Dude, this is like gamer mecca. I'm really glad we managed to find our way here. (My Charizard cap makes another appearance!)

We camwhore for a while in front of the building and then it starts drizzling and we head off to the Inari Shrine/Temple.

Again we walk (what is it with us and walking) and we take a hell of a time walking there because it IS quite far away. But even without a map and taking a few wrong turns ("Look! My radar has found us schoolgirls!!"), we finally reach the shrine.

There are souveneir shops and immediately the Shinsengumi happi-jacket catches my eye and I fish out my wallet to buy it.

Yan Wen and I cleanse our hands.

Then let's descend/ascend into the rows and rows of torii-gates!

I apologise for the total lopsideness of the picture.

It was getting dark because of the impending drizzle and taking pictures there was a pain in the ass because of the huge amounts of people walking into the pictures at the wrong times. We managed to get a few good group shots and a few candid shots and then zipped off to Kiyomizu-dera.

I ended up buyin a bokuto for myself which is lying on my floor at the moment. I plan to hang it up above my bed so I can readily jump into battle if ninjas attack me.

Zomg! Then at Kiyomizu-dera I spotted another maiko! I stopped her and formally asked her if I could take a picture and sadly for her she obliged. I say sadly because then everyone started taking pictures of her and she had a hard time getting away.

The last time I was at Kiyomizu-dera, I didn't manage to leisurely walk around the temple grounds because we were in a tour group. This time, we felt like cheating the system and hence made our way in from the back in order to avoid paying the ticket fare. Worthwhile because we saw a whole hill of statues bathed in red petals.

In the end, we decided that we should pay the entrance fee and we walked back to the right entrance. Yan Wen wanted to do some shopping and since he'd already been to Kiyomizu-dera the day before while waiting for us, we arranged to meet an hour later.

I tried lifting the iron stuff up but gaaah, it was hard. the one which teh guy was holding, I couldn't even budge it. It took TWO buff caucasian men to left the damn thing up!

Wandered around the inner temple grounds a bit.

Then we hit another smaller shrine. That whole shebang about lovers and fate and what not.

I was contemplating on whether I should do the ritual walk thing, where I'm supposed to close my eyes and find my way from the end of this walkway to a stone around 40metres ahead of me. I ended up doing it and actually made it. So technically, according to the myth, I should find my love and we shall have a happy life together. =A=;; You shinto gods have been lying to me!

Well actually I had a relatively easier time because I had my bokuto in my hand and was actually (accidentally!!) whacking people out of my way. Still I managed to find the rock without much difficulty.

Following the main path, we finally reached the fountain-thing (wtf I have bad descriptors) where there was an effing long queue lining up to drink sacred water. I honestly wanted to give it another shot, but I figured, since I'd already drunk some back in 2004 and the queue was too long, I skipped out.

Sideways, once again.

Then it was souvenir buying time!!! The steep streets leading up to Kiyomizu-dera were lined with shops peddling their wares from porcelain teacups to sesame odango. I ended up emptying my wallet to a couple of pocket mirrors for some of the class girls, two boxes of odango for my family and a porcelain teacup for my grandmother. Yan Wen and I were trying to figure out what to buy for her because we knew that if we bought her food, she'd never eat it until it was close to expiring. Even then, she'd try to give it back to us to eat. :D()()

Lunch was near Shijo-dori at a medium-sized restaurant. They didn't have an English menu so I had hell of a time trying to decipher the menu which was totally in kanji. Hur. Made some small talk with the lady-owner of the joint and tried some Japanese on her. Strangely her English was pretty good? O: But we had an interesting conversation situating around food.

Yan Wen wanted to visit Kagizen Yoshifusa, a famous confectionary, which was on Shijo-dori so we walked off in that direction. Again because of the indescript location and street names, we had a hell of a time looking for it because it was so wall-flower-ish and actually walked past it twice without realizing it.

The first time was when we saw two maiko stroll past us and I immediately stopped in my tracks and asked for a photo and they obliged!! ~~I would've threatened them with my bokuto if they hadn't. Just joking.~~

(MY HAIR IS AWFUL HERE.)

I love the kimono patterns. It's like <333. I thanked them using the Kyoto dialect (I used it on the ladyowner of the restaurant and got a pleasantly surprised raised eyebrow look) and they were like "!!!! Ookini~~~!" XD HAHAHAH. Zomg the Soshi is springing teh Surprises on unsuspecting Kyotoites.

I guess we were kind of blurred out because we realized that we walked past Kagizen 15 minutes later when we tried consulting our useless map. "ARGH IT WAS WHERE WE SAW THE GEISHA!!!!!!!" Yan Wen bemoans. We walk into the store and its packed to the brim with people. In fact, besides the crowd around the display table/cashier, there's a whole line of people snaking upstairs to what I suspect is the ochaya where they serve the confectionaries.

Excuse my bad speeling.

He ends up buying a box of mochi of which we'd have crazy adventures with much later on.

So on we go a long bus ride to Ryoan-ji, where Leon wants to check out the rock garden. I suggest we skip Kinkakuji because it's slightly overrated plus the fact that we only have time to visit one more shrine (it was already around 4pm then). I think we took one whole hour to get to Ryoanji, and by then it was freezing cold for some odd reason. We had to walk a few hundred metres to the temple grounds itself because the bus stopped outside a university (zomg university boys~~). So amidst the seemingly subzero temperature, we ran towards the temple gates and grabbed tickets to the rock garden. The ticket-person exclaimed that we were rather later. :D()

But it was worth it. Entering the grounds, I see my first fully bloomed shidarezakura or weeping cherry blossom. Beautiful. No other words to describe it. Boughs of pink blossoms weighing the branches down as though they are a tonne...

Slowly we make our way to the rock garden entrance and present our tickets to the guy at the entrance. He stops me for a moment and asks if I need him to keep my bokuto, I politely decline. "Daijoubu desu."

HAHA, my bokuto gets lots of attention. Especially since it's more than half my height. :D()

The rock garden's verandas and boardwalks are filled with people are sitting quietly, staring reverently at the delicately raked gravel; or they're chatting amongst themselves. I hear snippets of philosophy, some about travels and some about food. Everything's relaxed and calm.

I tried to catch some lower shots of the rock garden by dangling my camera on self-timer mode. Can't say that the photos were any good, but it was worth a try! I'm glad I paid Ryoanji's zen garden a visit. I wouldn't have appreciated it if I went anytime earlier, now was the best time and the best place.

It was nearing the rock garden's closing time so we retrieved our shoes and took a leisurely walk around the huge pond centred in the middle of Ryoan-ji.

Can you see the gasp-inducing reflection in the water?!

I had to physically climb over bushes and lodge myself in the middle of some to prevent myselfr from falling into the pond to get this and a few other shots. The life and times of an aspiring photographer.

And then we saw this sign:

And went like "UH OH..." because we'd been running around on the moss to take photos and stuff. :D()() I actually scared a Japanese couple because I burst out of the bushes.

Ryoanji's carpark is godlike. Where else can you find a parking space surrounded with blooming sakura and an old lamp-post to boot?

It gets really really cold by now and we decide that it's time to head back to Tokyo. We catch another long bus ride back to Kyoto Station and after purchasing our shinkansen tickets, we head down to Isetan's basement to grab dinner for the train ride back. Buying dinner consisted of lots of Ellyne cutting queues and getting the counter people yelling at her XDXD, me strolling around deciding what to eat because everything looks so good, my cousin going slightly nuts because of all the cakes laid out in front of him. I love speaking Japangrish to the counter people. It's like "kani-kuriimu kuroketto hitotsu~ chiizu tomato hambagaa hitotsu~~". Hurhur.