As it turned out, we walked more than average on our “take it easy” day. Before going to Kyoto, we decided to check out Osaka Castle first. We ate onigiri for breakfast again. I had this idea to try all the flavors. Flavors include normal-for-Americans ones like beef and chicken. Others include normal-for-Americans-through-osmosis flavors like bonito flakes, tuna, salmon and seaweed. Other weirder or simply bizarre ones were spicy fish roe and mayonnaise. The train station stopped on the outskirts of the vast Osaka Castle grounds. We had to walk another 15-20 minutes to get to the actual castle. Along the way, we passed by the giant moat that surrounds the castle. The funny thing is that the moat was only filled with water on one side. The moat at the backside of the castle was dry and filled with greenery. We also passed by lots of trees, which helped alleviate the heat of the day a little, and made the castle grounds more inviting than the Todaiji grounds we walked through the day before. The long walk made me imagine that I was a soldier in an enemy force, trying to take control of the Castle. Seeing as we had to pass the moat and climb uphill, all while being in view of the castle, made me feel insanely vulnerable and weak. This made me very impressed by how much of a fortress Osaka Castle must have been back in the Edo period. Once we got to the castle, the sight made the long walk worthwhile. The castle has gold plating at several spots, and is several stories high. My dad liked it so much, he called it his house. The castle sits atop a hill on the hill with no visible entryway, making it difficult to understand how people used to get into the castle before elevators and large-scale construction equipment. The castle was surrounded by pretty trees. We did not go inside the castle, as a fee was involved, and we needed to get to Kyoto. My sister was complaining the whole time, since her feet were still hurting. Anyways, we eventually found our way to the train station to go to Kyoto. At Kyoto Station, we managed to find a train to Arashiyama. There we walked around quite a while for a lunch location. My sister was using Google Maps to find a specific place. She was unable to find it, but we happened to find a small restaurant in a back alley. The restaurant had a sign saying, “Sorry, we are chartered out for today!” That sounded like a tour bus was taking up the whole restaurant or something. I was thinking we should find another place, but thank goodness my mom went in to see if we could get eat there. As it turned out, we could! We waited for just a few minutes, and then we sat down at the table. We saw that the menu they gave us had only a few limited options. We ordered one of each. We ordered a chirashi dish, which has sashimi over rice. The chirashi also included a really fine fish roe that tasted really sweet, almost like sugar. We also ordered sashimi, which was good. We also ordered unagi rice which was gloriously tasty! The most special item we ordered was a tofu soup. The soup was served in a paper sheet, which was placed into a metal flame holder. The flame was lit, and that is how the soup was boiled! I was amazed at the paper. It felt so thin, yet the soup did not break it down, and the flame didn’t even leave any charring. The tofu wasn’t particularly tasty, but the texture was good, and it was nice to drink some soup. This was probably my favorite meal. Not only was the food great, but the atmosphere was also good. There were just three other tables of people, and they all seemed like local Japanese people. One was a table of two young women, the next was a table of six elderly women, and the last was a family of three with a small baby, To summarize, the meal and restaurant felt authentically Japanese. The only issue was that the restaurant runners, who seemed like a husband and a wife, were really busy and it was hard to flag them down for the check or more tea. We went out back to the main street, where we found a food stand selling a cucumber on a stick. What an intriguing street snack! We got one. It was quite salty, meaning it had been pickled. My dad seemed to eat a lot of it. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t get full at lunch. I don’t think my dad can handle meals without meat, which we had a lot of since it was Japan, the land of fish and rice. If the cucumber had been colder, it would have been quite a refreshing snack on such a hot day. Next, we walked to the Moon-Reflecting Bridge. My mom seemed to be really infatuated with the idea of it, perhaps because it reminded her of an old folktale told to her by my late grandfather when she was a child. Next, we went looking for the Zhou Enlai Peace Monument. I was starting to get a lot of heat rashes by this point in the trip, and my mom kept putting some wet towels on my neck. I bought some soda to cool down. We found the monument: It was a rock plaque with some declarations of peace between Japan and China, as well as a poem by Zhou Enlai. My mom kept looking around for an image she found online, a piece of wood with “No more war!” written on it. We did not find it, and I thought it bizarre that she knew of something that no one else did. I suspected she found the image from her various WeChat groups with other Chinese people. After researching it a bit later on, I found an article about bad tourists in Japan, including talks of vandalism. This led me to my current belief that the picture she saw online was a work of vandalism near the Bamboo Grove by Chinese tourists. Since the time the picture was taken, the vandalism was erased and removed. Next, we went to the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove. I was too hot to really enjoy it too much, but it was nice. There were just too many people taking beauty shots and clogging up the area. Finally, we found our way to the street, where we flagged a taxi down. The taxi was driven by an elderly man. We told him we wanted to go to Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion. The cost would be $30. My parents encouraged me to talk to him in Japanese. I felt nervous, but was determined to try. I wanted to ask him what his hometown was, but I didn’t know how to say “hometown.” Our Wi-Fi was down, so I had to dig out my old pocket dictionary from high school. I used the word furusato. The driver replied that he was from Kyoto. My sister asked me to ask him his top five sights in Kyoto. He said that Kinkaku-ji was number one (ichiban). He might have also mentioned Kiyomizu-dera, the clear water temple. He also mentioned how on top of the mountain once a year, they lit a fire, to light the way home for spirits. It would have been cool to see that. I related this all to my family. Anyways, we got to Kinkakuji. The admission fee was $4 per person, not too bad. The pavilion was nice, but it was not anything more than what I could see in a publicity photo. Along the pathway around the pavilion, there was a game where you try to get a coin into a bucket from 5-10 feet away. It was a fun reimagining of the wishing well. I commented to my dad that it was just an easy way to get money from tourists. Anyways, we soon took another taxi to Kiyomizu-dera, the temple that Cari most wanted to see. This time the taxi was driven by a middle-aged lady. We talked to her about the cost of living in Kyoto. She told us she was lower-class, since she only made $2,500 a month (and apparently that was the cost of her rent). We told her about the insanely high rents in San Francisco. She also told us she was unmarried with a son, and was trying to buy a house. The road to Kiyomizu-dera was a couple blocks of tourist-y shops. The first thing you see of the temple is an orange pagoda. It was super bright orange, making all the Torii gates we’ve seen very dilapidated-looking in comparison. Everything about the Kiyomizu-dera looked really… new. So many bright colors and smooth, sleek surfaces. So that is why I call Kiyomizu-dera the “yuppie” temple. It’s the most modern and contemporary out of all the temples we saw. Inside the temple, we saw a many-armed Buddha in a dark display. I really liked the big lantern in the middle of the room. It had an intricate design that looked cool. In the back of the temple, we saw tourists behaving badly again. Cari took a picture of them. After a moderate walk down the side of the heavily forested mountain (I took a nice picture of the sunset), we got to the clear water. I had the impression it would be a waterfall, but really it was some gutters spitting out “clear water” into a pool. It was just a tourist attraction where people catch the water being spit out and clean their hands and mouth with it. The water represents things like success and examination success and all that talisman stuff, but I didn’t really care. Next, we just started walking around. Cari started leading us to the geisha district. That got me irritated. We had decided to only see the three sights in Kyoto (Arashiyama, Kinkaku-ji and Kiyomizu-dera) the night before. Why now were we going somewhere else?? Because Cari thought we were hungry, we found a soba restaurant, which was filled with Korean and Chinese tourists. There was some weird rule that we had to order one of the specialty matcha soba noodles. We didn’t get a chance to ask about this because Mommy (like usual) wants zero discussion. So I got the matcha soba. They were actually pretty good, except I was expecting some chicken, too. Daddy just broke into a rage, which kinda ruined the whole experience. Anyways, it turned out we were just a couple blocks from the geisha district. And we didn’t see a single thing there. The architecture was different, but it’s nothing you can’t see in Japantown in San Francisco. It just confirmed to me that the whole endeavor to go to the Geisha District was pointless. At this point I just wanted to leave. There was a temple brightly lit with lanterns, but we didn’t go in. We just walked along a touristy street filled with every sign mentioning geishas, and we got to the train station. Then we just went back to Tennoji. Here, we finally bought the cake that kept catching our eye at the convenience store. We thought it was the soufflé pancakes that have been making a splash in San Francisco, but it actually turned out to be cheesecake. I don’t normally eat cheesecake (since I don’t like cheese), so perhaps my opinion doesn’t count for much, but I liked the cake. It still had the cheese taste, but it was more tolerable than usual. Jaa, oyasumi nasai.
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AuthorI was born and raised in San Francisco, California. I am proud of my Chinese heritage, and I think my background gives me a unique edge on this vast field of opinion. As a self-proclaimed music historian, I have loved pop music ever since I first heard it. These are my opinions on some of the recent albums and songs that are making a splash in the industry. Archives
December 2020
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