Temple Run 2
The afternoon of our first day was spent on a personal tour, organised by Audley Travel, with a local guide. So just the two of us and Ms Yamashita, who met us at our hotel and took us by taxi to one of the nearby temples, and we walked back, visiting other temples and famous districts along the way. Our guide spoke very good English, and was very knowledgeable about the places we visited.
The streets were very busy. It was good to see, though, that many of the visitors seemed to be Japanese, not all foreigners. Lots of people were dressed in traditional dress - kimonos for the women and plain robes for the men. The women had very neat and tidy hairstyles with flowers in their hair, looking very nicely made-up. I was sneakily trying to get some of these in a photograph with the temple in the background, but then lost a bit of interest when I asked our guide if people dressed like that regularly and the reply was that since Kyoto is famous for the kimono, many people get dressed up like that as a touristy thing, and that many of the people in their kimonos weren't even Japanese!
The first temple was nice, though temples have pretty much lost their effect on us since our Asia trip - they are all pretty similar and the various ways they have developed as a means of separating you from your money (not tourists, but the religious) is worthy of the Christian church! Japanese Temples and Shrines are pretty similar to their South East Asian counterparts, with plenty of gold leaf and swirly bits, but the woodwork in places is really good - and some parts are built without nails, just perfectly fitting joints. The newly-awakened woodworker in me was very appreciative of this.
My question as to whether this was a Shinto temple was met with an incredulous smile and a simple statement 'No. This is a temple.'. Ah yes, of course, Buddhism has Temples, Shintoism has Shrines. How stupid of me. I did inwardly feel somewhat vindicated later though when we visited a Shinto Shrine that seemed to me to look very similar to the Buddhist Temple we had just left.
As we exited the Shrine, our guide pointed out some of the smaller Shrines which lined the approach, including a Shrine to kitchen knives - apparently household items are thought to have their own spirits and after a lifetime (their lifetime, not the owner's!) of service, rather than just throw them away, the owners bring them to their own shrine and leave them there (with an appropriate donation, of course), where the monks take care of them. Presumably by throwing them away.
The tour finished with a wander around one of the Geisha districts in Kyoto. The district itself was nothing spectacular, just an old fashioned area with some narrow streets and wooden buildings, but it was nice getting a description of the Geisha way of life. There are two ‘states' - neither of which are called Geisha. The trainees are called Meiko and they look just like the older, ‘qualified' Geikos, except to the trained eye, who can spot the small differences. The Meikos train for a few years and work to pay off the cost of their training, run in what sounded like brothels (though sexual favours were not mentioned in the description we got!) headed by a ‘Big Moma', who sounded suspiciously like a Madam. Their life is very restrictive - they can't be seen in public doing anything out of the traditional Geisha character, their hair needs to be kept in an elaborate hairstyle for much of the time, so no washing it very often etc. Once they progress to Geiko level, things get a little easier, but it still doesn't sound like a great life. Numbers are diminishing, but there is still a demand for their services as hostesses (servers, dancing, entertaining etc) for various functions. They sounded like over-hyped prostitutes to me, but maybe I got the wrong end of the stick.
After our somewhat successful attempt at finding our own vegetarian dinner, we decided to finish off with a dessert of some kind. The sweet potato + ice cream + cream crêpes that were on offer didn't appeal today - though sweet potato is very sweet and it is only our western sensibilities that insist on thinking it must be a main course item, not a dessert, we thought we would go for a nice looking doughnut. A creme brulee doughnut to be exact, from a small shop opposite our hotel. After our struggle in the restaurant to try to get ourselves understood, we thought there would be no problem on the occasion since there was a big billboard with a creme brulee doughnut pictured outside the stall. Emma duly went over to the nice young man behind the counter and switched on 'gesture mode' to point at the billboard and start walking over to it to point at the picture. 'Ah, you want creme brulee doughnut! One or two?' Said the server, in very good English. I'm not sure why we both thought he would struggle more with a bit of French as well as English, especially when it is an item he was selling, but it was slightly humourous to our jet lagged selves nonetheless.
Back to our hotel, passing a cat cafe, where you can enjoy your drink (and possibly a fur-covered snack - we didn't visit it to see what was on offer) whilst sitting amongst some resident cats (in a very clean environment, as opposed to the equivalent ‘mouse and rat cafes' in India, where the animals are resident, but not usually intentionally so!). We may try one of those cafes later.
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