Kyoto

We left Tokyo on Wednesday morning exhausted, aching, hung over, and city-saturated. We had done a week of Tokyo in two days and we felt it. The train to Kyoto was everything we had been promised. The high-speed Shinkansen is a marvel of public transportation. It had to have been travelling over 100 miles per hour, which is probably exciting to daredevils, but made Clare and I nauseous. Nonetheless, we were in Kyoto in three hours and ready to take on a new city.

Kyoto is nothing like Tokyo. Replace all the fast-paced modernity with old world charm and all the frantic lifestyle with zen-like calm. In stark contrast to our bunk-bed hostel in Tokyo, our home in Kyoto was just that-- a home. We stayed at a Japanese house in Northern Higashiyama with a lovely family, the husband a French expat and the wife a Kyoto local. The neighborhood was too cute for words (but I'll try, I always do) with tiny winding streets lined by stone walls and flowers spilling from private gardens. Think Georgetown but add genuine historic value and remove all popped collars.



Our house (not technically a ryokan but set up like one) was adorable. The entire house is a dark wood that had soaked up the scent of four hundred years of incense. The floors were covered with tatami mats and the only table was a small round one surrounded by simple beanbag cushions. The shower and bathroom were outdoors through the back gardens, but modernized to be comfortable. Our hosts had set up a room for us with mattresses on the floor, painted paper walls, and reed shades on the windows that looked out over the front garden where cats prowled the rooftops (much to Clare's chagrin). It was perfection.












Tiny, tiny perfection. When we first arrived, we removed our shoes in the garden and stepped in through the sliding rice paper doors and almost immediately stood up into one of the ceiling beams. It would be the first of many head bumpings over the next two days. I hit my head three times going from my room to the bathroom-- an epic lack of coordination, even for me.


But the entire experience was fantastic. Our hosts were the most gracious, charming people we have met in Japan. Divyam, the French expat, was a wealth of information about the town. The house was perfectly situated between a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple. As Divyam said, he is keeping the peace. And peace was really the theme of our time in Kyoto. Our first half-day there it was raining and we laid down for a small afternoon rest only to wake four hours later feeling refreshed and cleansed of Tokyo. We ventured out only twice that first day-- both times for food and both times shocked and thrilled by the fantastic cuisine. A separate post on our culinary adventures in Japan is forthcoming.




Our second day in Kyoto we were ready to take on the temples that the city is famous for. We rented bikes and embarked on a really remarkable (and physically quite challenging) day of biking through the mountains from temple to temple. We got lost a lot, we saw more Buddhas and shrines and mountain views than I could possibly catalog here, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I'll post some pictures below with the caveat that they cannot do justice to the beauty and immensity of these places.























After a fantastic dinner (sorry, you'll have to wait, but this one was a doozy) we partook in the Kyoto tradition of the public baths. Quite frankly, I'm surprised we were not kicked out. The baths serve a utilitarian function in a city where the houses pre-date modern plumbing. Clare and I thought it would be more like a waterpark. Incorrect. There are four baths: holy shit hot, medium-rare organs hot, flesh from bone hot, and ice cold. After some brief and squealing experimentation, we opted for the holy shit hot pool, which was bubbling red like a scene from Jaws. It was hot. Holy shit. Fortunately the holy shit hot pool was right next to the ice cold pool so we came up with the clever idea to reach our arms through the shrubbery separating the pools and dip our towels in the cold water. Mind you, there were people bathing in the cold pool when our mysterious, detached arms appeared waving around towels. We then ran the cold water over our heads and gasped like dying fish from the shock.


After we were convinced that we'd never reproduce again, Clare got into the cold pool and I decided to try my hand at the 95 degree celsius sauna. Another terrible idea. The woman across from me was calmly sitting cross legged with a towel around her head doing some yoga-like stretches. In my best attempt at nonchalance, I sat down across from her and immediately shreiked and jumped from the seat which was scalding hot. One disdainful look and I was gone, back to the cold pool where Clare had one leg up to the knee and one hand in the pool and was debating immersing the other foot. A little cold splashing and we decided the baths were perhaps not for us. A collective sigh was heard over Kyoto when we called it a night.

Then to Nara.... a tale for another day.