They totally freakin' rawked, btw.
At this point there is a LOT of photos and a lot of smaller details that Bob keeps leaving to me because I apparently remember them better, except that by the time I'm done tagging and uploading photos I'm usually exhausted. So I've started and forgotten 3 posts over the last 3 days, and I want you all to blame Bob for fudging and deciding he wouldn't give a good enough round up. In fact, email him about it. Because that would be funny.
It would appear from the global news that the world is poised to scream its lungs out over Manchester United vs. Barcelona, and we're rooting for ManU just so Spain doesn't have to deal with a riot.
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give a quick rundown of what we did in Kyoto as best I can remember and link the snot out of wikipedia so you guys can read up on your own for more detail. I'm also going to post links to the albums so you can go take a peak.
Kyoto, Day 2... Johnnie Hillwalker's Kyoto walking tour, inappropriately named. It was Johnnie Hillwalker's stand around in a parking lot or in an active back alley and point at buildings while talking about them lower than most of the group can hear, Tours. We did see the major temple for the Pure Land sect of Buddhism in Japan (currently in a literal dry-dock to protect it from the weather while it's being restored.). We also went on to see a few small shinto shrines and a cemetary as well as a few other craft shops. The shrines and temples interested me. Standing outside a closed bath house made of yellow brick talking about how it's world famous... yet closed... not so much. However, we did get to see that the claim of there being 9,000 shrines and temples in Kyoto is probably accurate and not hyperbole. Also got to see the original headquarters of Nin-Ten-Do... some of you might have seen their products at some time? Super Mario Bros, maybe? Except when they were in their downtown Kyoto headquarters, most of what they made were playing cards. They still do, in fact, and we saw workers carrying them out to delivery trucks as we stood there.
After the sweets shop my feet hurt so bad I couldn't handle standing around listening to Mr. Serious give more talks, so we slipped out and walked the two blocks back to the hotel after finding a place for lunch. It was literally called "Coffee and Lunch" and what they actually meant was "We have coffee. If you gesticulate wildly at the omelette and rice pictured on our menu, we will also make you that, but it's not normal." However, might I say, it was damned good food.
We were so blitzed we crashed and napped (walking and standing for 5 hours will do that for you) then rose to shower and treated ourselves to dinner at the hotel's restaurant.
Y'all... I had grilled calf's liver and a cup of cauliflower soup, and I ~liked~ it. Huzzah for new culinary horizons! Bob had a plate of multiple dead farm animals, labeled the "mixed grill", and it was everything from our fluffy lamb friends to our porcine pals and on to our beefy buds. He tells me right now that the beef was excellent, and says it with shining eyes that tell me he will think back on it and salivate while stuck with PB&J sandwiches in the future.
Aaaand... that was kind of that. Except I believe we made a late-night run down to a Circle K quickie-mart to grab a few small things and just to get out in the beautiful night air.
The next day? Oh, lemme tell you about the next day.
Fushimi Inari Taisha... the mother of all Shinto shrines dedicated to the god of rice, Inari... guarded by the sacred foxes of Inari and so important that they dedicated an entire MOUNTAIN to it. Fushimi Inari Taisha, home of the twenty million orange and black torii doors that you have seen in every guidebook about Japan and Kyoto specifically, even if you didn't know that's what it was. And I have wanted to walk on the paths of Fushimi Inari Taisha ever since I saw an article for it in National Geographic when I was 15-16 years old. I stood there in awe of the thousands of torii and then... I giggled madly. And went everywhere we could without risking life, limb, or being yelled at by the shrine workers.
It was lovely to hike up the mountains early in the morning and I can easily say this was my favorite thing in all of kyoto. There were large toriis and small offering-sized torii everywhere. I could go on, but.... here... just lookit the damn pictures:
Click here for more complete and utter awesomeness.
Fox statues were ~everywhere~ on the mountain, some wrapped in the sacred red cloths they favor, some in decorative brocade... you name it.
Even when we were not under tree cover and in direct sun, the torii were so many that we walked in dappled shade the entire time. It was awe-inspiring, and with that and the beauty of the mountain one could easily see why they loved it so much and held it as sacred.
Hell, I even tossed in a few coins to one of the offering boxes and said a prayer, and even filled out a little fox-faced ema asking for a good life:
(Yes, that IS the infamous "Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo! Konnichiwa!" shirt that gets us stared at every time it's worn.)
This was the Japan I was hoping for and looking for, the one that might be haunted in the evenings as everyone is leaving and where the sheer power of belief kept the ancient gods walking.
Fushimi Inari Taisha, btw, is rare as Shinto shrines go. Shinto gods and spirits do not have images that are worshipped, or even symbols. The kami are strictly spirits that are invisible to human eyes, and usually a space is designated as their home but nothing is in it. Fushimi Inari, though, has Inari's mirror in several of the shrines all over the mountain as a symbol. It is one of the very few that does.
I am actually kicking myself for not snagging a miniature of it, or of the little guardian foxes that flanked it. It would've been awesome and I blew it off thinking "I'm not Shinto, do I really want to dust it?" *sigh* Yeah... I do now...
After we made our way back down off the mountain we stopped at the little shops at the base... shrines and temples are good business, as the tourists stop there and buy items to remember it by. We found many, many nifty gifts. I won't go in to detail here because some of them are Xmas presents. But they are nifty.
Also, Bob found me a lovely pink pearl necklace and snagged it for me, having overheard my desire to have a piece of jewelry to remember the country by. I thought that was really sweet of him.
We had lunch at a small shop where an elderly woman missing her two front teeth kept saying "Hai hai! Dozo, dozo!!" to everything and smiling and waving us to go this way or that with her hands. She served us broiled eel in sweet sauce and oyakodon rice with shrimp tempura and it was stunningly good.
We then headed back to the hotel to sort things and get them packed to send off via takyuubin to Tokyo, and to get ready for the kaiseki meal.
Kaiseki is a specialized feast where the local style of cooking is used to accentuate the flavors of whatever food is in season. It is a luxury that was once reserved for the samurai class and royalty, and now is practiced elsewhere as a more bastardized tradition.
Wanting to have not just good kaiseki, but stuff we could be sure was not some tourist-diluted crap, I hopped online the previous day and began hitting foodie journals to see what they recommended as great locations.
Somewhere in there I found Kichisen, the Kyoto restaurant of one Yoshimi Tanagawa. He is well known in Japan and the US for beating Iron Chef Morimoto in the Iron Chef TV series. Morimoto is big news in the US for the restaurants he's opened in NY and elsewhere. Any man that could beat Morimoto would be more than sufficient to serve us excellent kaiseki.
We got dressed up. I wore a dress, ya'll.... And one harrowing taxi ride later from a man who wasn't sure where he was going and another panicked street crossing and we found ourselves being greeted at the door by one of the wait staff, who knew immediately who we were.
We were escorted in, asked to remove our shoes, and then taken along a beautiful hallway where two of the wait staff knelt and bowed to us, thanking us for coming to their establishment. On the way down the tatami-mat hallway we passed a small dry stone garden with moss and ferns off to the side. It was idyllic and reminiscent of the older Kyoto houses that are slowly disappearing.
A turned corner and one of the kneeling waitstaff bowed again and slide open the rice paper door for us, motioning for us to go in. Once inside, we saw that they had set fresh flowers in the alcove, but the only other things in the room were two chairs, the table, and two smaller side tables that later held the trays. An iron hanger holding a silk brocade shield kept us from viewing the hallway each time they opened the door to check on us or bring food, keeping our complete immersion in the event from being disturbed.
Once there, they spoke to us entirely in Japanese and with hand gestures, and one gentleman who knew enough english to ask us things like Hot? Cold? Okay, arigato... The food was never explained to us in English at any time. We listened as they brought in each dish, pointed to what each thing was, said their piece, nodded, and then they exited so we could enjoy. There is no experience equivalent in the Western world.
I believe we can safely say that there was upwards of 12 different dishes brought in. Everything from sweet peas in a chilled sweet broth to whole grilled fish pickled in white miso before being set out on the hibachi. For that last one, Bob and I looked at each other for a long moment before diving in, at which time the taste was so wonderful that, even having bitten the head off first, I uttered an "Oh!" very loudly in surprise. I would eat those again in a heartbeat even though they looked at us before we chowed down.
We had fish in every imaginable way, along with melons, pickled vegetables, regular vegetables, and fruits. Desert was fresh fruits with a complimentary liquor. I had a ripe fresh passion fruit with the top cut off and the insides so fresh and ripe they could be spooned out like a soup. Bob's was a melon with a type of clear jello in the same shape of the melon and a net of spun sugar and flower blossoms. After ~that~ they brought us bowls of matcha and seemed very pleased that we knew to study the bowls and comment on how beautiful they were before turning the main designs outward so that others could see it. (Who knew the tea ceremony lesson at Shofuso back in Philly would come in useful so soon?)
They followed THAT up with sweetened sticky rice wrapped around sweet red bean paste, then all of that wrapped in a sweetened pickled cherry leaf. The last item was a cup of hot bancha-tea in beautiful cups marked with Kichisen's logo. Then a taxi was called, the hostess came in and gave us the remainder of the rice and steamed fish's-head meat that we didn't have room to consume along with a pair of chopsticks and a gift fan with a beautiful printed golden koi on it to thank us for coming. When the taxi arrived, all 3 of the people who had been waiting on us walked out with us, helped us get our shoes on, thanked us again, then with the front door's attendant, they escorted us down to the taxi and told the driver where we needed to go.
Two things at this point. First: they didn't ask us where we'd come from. They just remembered the hotel from our initial reservation and had looked up the name and address specifically to tell the cab driver.
Second: We were the only ones there for 80% of the meal. There was only one other customer there, and we only knew that because their shoes were by the front door as we left.
It had been my hope that we could have a highly unique and wonderful culinary experience, and this one completely blew Bob and I away. I grinned the whole way home and Bob commented on various parts in between fielding me grabbing for him when our kamikaze cab driver whipped in and out of traffic. (At one point he road the bumper fo the guy who cut him off and flashed his brights...ahh, a bit of home. Japan has road-rage too...)
After that? Yeah. We collapsed. Happily so.
