71: TORII, BAMBOO, AND MONKEYS

The Fushimi-Inari Shrine is the coolest shrine I've ever been to - it has 10 000 torii gates lined up in a row.

We also went to Sanjusangen-do, a temple which has 1000 life sized statues of the 1000-armed Kannon (the Buddhist goddess of mercy) surrounding a gigantic statue of Kannon, inside the longest wooden building in Japan. There are actually only 40 arms on Kannon, but each arm saves 25 worlds, so that is supposed to equal 1000. On top of the 40 arms, Kannon also has 11 heads. It's too bad we weren't allowed pictures in the temple, because it was an awesome sight.

The Arashiyama area, my favourite area in Kyoto, was beautiful and scenic. We went to the bamboo grove and to Monkey Mountain. It was an experience being surrounded by monkeys in the wild who kept screeching and running around with red butts. The little hike up to the monkey park was so hot and tiring that we needed to get gelato at a gelateria that won third place at an international gelato contest!

I received some horrible news from home today, and it made me think about how so many bad things are happening in the world right now. There is just so much death and destruction going on everywhere. Life is short, and it is so fragile, and anything can happen when you least expect it. I can't even fathom how people deal with all this devastation when it happens to their loved ones. Your whole life can change in the blink of an eye, and there's nothing you can do about it.

70: KYOTO

Nijo-jo gardens

Our goal for the day was to go to the castle in the morning, have lunch, and then go to two temples in the afternoon. We did the castle and lunch, but then we got sidetracked along the way to the temple with...MOCHI samples. There is a street in Kyoto called Sannen-Zaka with shops full of samples. They have samples of all kinds of mochi, and they even pour you tea to wash it all down. I was in mochi heaven.

We did eventually make it to one temple called Kiyomizu-dera.

I liked it because it was very interactive. We started off at the Tainai-meguri, which my guidebook kept recommending, but it also teased us with descriptions like, "We don’t want to tell you too much about this hall as it will take away from the experience. Suffice to say, by entering the hall, you are figuratively entering the womb of Daizuigu Bosatsu, a female Bodhisattva who has the power to grant any human wish." It was a fun and interesting descent into the womb!


Then there is the Jishu-jinja, "the Love Shrine", where you walk with your eyes closed between a pair of love stones which are set about 20 metres apart. If you miss the second stone, it means your desire for love will not be fulfilled. No one in the temple seemed to be doing this love exercise, but I decided to go for it. I closed my eyes, held my arms out in front of me, and repeatedly yelled out, "SUMIMASEN" ("Excuse me") so that the crowds of tourists would get out of my way. Here I am reaching the second rock successfully!

We never made it to the second temple because our food stops had delayed us by too much. We waited for the lights to turn on in the Higashiyama area at night, then it was off to curry udon dinner. We saw a real life geisha walking out of a temple tonight - I thought she was a fake one (most of the ones you see in Kyoto are tourists dressed up as geisha) so all I did was stare at her as she walked past me. But after she walked into a black unmarked car with several men, I found out that Andy had been told to move aside by the geisha's bodyguard. Turns out she was a real one!

69: ON EARTHQUAKES AND FIRE

We were lucky we managed to catch the 8:30am train from Nagasaki to Kyoto. As the train neared Kyoto station at about 2:45pm though, it stopped, just short of the platform, for about 20 minutes. We stood by the doors with our luggage ready, wondering what the hold up was. Finally, there was an announcement in Japanese: there had been an earthquake, and the train was to be delayed by 2 hours for its final destination of Tokyo. A chorus of discontent erupted from the front of the car; a group of teenagers who were heading home after a day at Universal Studios in Osaka would not make it back to Tokyo on time. People rushed by us, trying to call their loved ones on their cell phones, but the lines were jammed. Phoebe reassured us that it was just another earthquake. "There are earthquakes all the time in Japan. Thousands of earthquakes every year," she said. There had even been a few earthquakes in Tokyo the past few days, but those were just business as usual.

Once we checked into our hotel, however, we were glued to the TV as we discovered that it was NOT just another earthquake. This turned out to be the only hotel that had an English channel throughout our whole stay in Japan, and we watched on BBC in disbelief as news and footage of the earthquake and ensuing tsunami unfolded before our eyes. In the other room, Phoebe was watching the news straight from NHK, the Japanese station. From now on, there were to be no more funny variety shows on tv. No more soap operas. It was all news.

We watched the news for hours, unable to tear ourselves away from the tv. The afternoon slowly turned into night, and finally we headed out for dinner to have some FIRE RAMEN. The chef literally sets your ramen on fire right in front of you. He gave us a list of rules before he did this. First, we had to tie our hair back (especially bangs, because they could get singed) and wear aprons. We were not allowed to get up and run away, because oil would splatter all over our seat and we would then have to sit down on an oily seat. Lastly, we should not scream nor be afraid. Well, the fire was hot, my apron protected me from the oil splatters, and the ramen was delicious.

Why do I always have such bad luck with natural disasters when I travel? Although, I suppose it was actually good luck that I wasn't in northeast Japan at the time. Depends how you look at it.