Nasty Conjugation

Here is day two of our blitzkrieg journey across Japan. We’ve got four more days to go, and the action is just starting to heat up. Won’t you join us in a few days for the next exciting entry?

Also, please enjoy the corresponding pictures!

We started day two of our quest bright and early, boarding a train headed in the general direction of Kyoto. We’d organized our travel into four-hour segments, attempting to catch as many expresses as we could between cities. The trains to Kyoto took us through some gorgeous landscape in Aichi and Gifu prefectures. The terrain is really mountainous and forested around there, and all the towns seemed basically rural and isolated. The houses we passed were almost entirely in the old style of Japanese architecture, wooden with tiled roofs and usually presiding over a garden or field. A lot of the towns cultivated whole fields of wildflowers that would speed past in a bright purple blur. Also, it seems that in rural towns all the schoolchildren wave when the trains go past. How nice!

We got to Kyoto around noon and went to the station’s bookstore to copy hostel phone numbers out of their travel guides. Kyoto Station deserves a description of its own. The building is enormous, stretching over twenty stories high and, I would guess, a few city blocks wide. It is a recent construction, and the center of a lot of controversy among the locals due to its massive and futuristic style. A lot of people wanted to retain the old-timey feel of the original Kyoto Station, but the powers that be at Japan Railways won out and built the fortress that stands now. It really is quite impressive, though Holly and I are torn on how dated it will look in twenty years. Fashionable perceptions of the future usually end up looking pretty clichéd when the future finally arrives.

A brief aside for the makers of guide books: why do all of your books have fax numbers for hostels but no actual phone numbers? Is the portable fax machine a travel trend that I missed out on? Maybe phone numbers only appear after you pay for the book, so in fact we were being punished for pirating the information for free. Well played, guide book creators. You win this time.

Despite the mischief of guide book makers, we managed to get a room at a youth hostel called K’s House. The building was pretty new and nice, very dorm-like, with friendly staff and clean bathrooms. After dropping off our backpacks, we headed off on what turned out to be quite a long walk to Kiyomizu-dera, a famous temple nestled in the foothills on the eastern outskirts of town. The temple was beautiful, but it was also unfortunately crowded. Hordes of schoolchildren and tour groups clogged the streets approaching the temple, and once we got there the grounds were similarly swamped. It’s the constant paradox of places like Kyoto or Kamakura – you go there for the peaceful environment of an ancient temple, but you have to contend with half of the country trying to do the same thing. Regardless, the view from the temple gate across the city at sunset was worth the visit.

Having satiated our desire for temples, we started the long walk home, stopping by a grocery store for some more discount sushi and bento boxes. The hostel had CNN, so we ate our meal while watching the never-ending parade of election season scandals. We wanted to go out for a drink after dinner but had a surprisingly difficult time finding an actual bar. We ended up back at the Station of the Future, at a ramen shop that appeared to have been decorated by Playskool. There we rearranged our trip schedule over beer and gyoza, opting to spend an additional day in Kyoto in order to see Ginkaku-ji and the Heian Costume Museum. Another successful day on the road behind us, we retired to K’s House and the relative comfort of our youth hostel bunk beds. I got the top bunk.

Next: Kyoto Day Two! But Where is Costa Del Sol?!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 3:15 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.