day 9
today we went shopping in kyoto. we strolled through an outdoor mall for several hours. then we went to the "handicrafts center" recommended by munchkin's guidebook. it wasn't the crappy little camp-crafts center the book made it sound like. it actually had lots of really nice things crafted by local artisans. so we now have all of our souvenir shopping done except for things for patrick. still no sign of chess sets. i'm starting to panic.
munchkin called to see if we could move our scuba reservations in izu to tomorrow, so we could maybe get an extra day in tokyo. yeah...the scuba place screwed us. there are no english-speaking guys available at all this week. so we've decided to cancel our dives in izu (since we wouldn't be able to understand things like depth limits, warnings about dangerous currents, names of local sites, etc.) and head to tokyo a couple days early. we're hoping to maybe go take a tour of mt fuji as well, which would be cool. if we get really bored in tokyo, we can also book dives from there. so we'll see how it goes.
we had a traditional japanese monk's dinner tonight. we had a ridiculous amount of warm, boiled tofu (served with soy sauce and green onions), grilled tofu with sesame paste, cold super-soft tofu, tempura (including pumpkin/squash, egglpant, and bamboo), a plate of pickled things (bamboo, mushrooms, weird paste-thing, weird green thing (possibly celery), weird possibly-root thing), and a plate of condiment-things like pickled chopped green stuff and tiny, tiny whole fish. also a bowl of steamed rice and a bunch of tea. it was quite tasty, but i was stuffed silly by the end of it.
then we went to gion corner, which is in gion (part of kyoto) but not on a corner. they give shows to kind of show foreigners what their traditional arts are like. so we saw a performance of the tea ceremony, a couple kinds of traditional music, a traditional geisha dance, flower arranging, their puppet theater, and the comedy acts that traditionally came between noh plays (but no actual noh for us tonight). we met this guy named matt (i think) from california, who munchkin claims was all disappointed when i said something about "my boyfriend." apparently she thinks he liked me or something. i am oblivious to this sort of thing, so who knows.
after the show, munchkin and i got a more personal demonstration fo the tea ceremony and got to try our hands at making the tea. it's a lot more complicated than just making tea. but it was a lot of fun, and the lady who was teaching us seemed to really like talking to us. (she's been to texas--she really liked the riverwalk in san antonio.)
then munchkin and i walked home. we saw some people with big, fluffy dogs (including a st bernard), so we stopped and made friends. then we got crazy-lost in an industrial part of town and nearly got run over several times as the sidewalk completely and utterly abandoned us. we eventually sorted things out, stopped for a late-night japanese snack run (though how i fit ice cream in on top of all that tofu, i'll never know), and made it home slightly before curfew.
anyhow, tomorrow we should have a pretty long train ride to tokyo.
munchkin called to see if we could move our scuba reservations in izu to tomorrow, so we could maybe get an extra day in tokyo. yeah...the scuba place screwed us. there are no english-speaking guys available at all this week. so we've decided to cancel our dives in izu (since we wouldn't be able to understand things like depth limits, warnings about dangerous currents, names of local sites, etc.) and head to tokyo a couple days early. we're hoping to maybe go take a tour of mt fuji as well, which would be cool. if we get really bored in tokyo, we can also book dives from there. so we'll see how it goes.
we had a traditional japanese monk's dinner tonight. we had a ridiculous amount of warm, boiled tofu (served with soy sauce and green onions), grilled tofu with sesame paste, cold super-soft tofu, tempura (including pumpkin/squash, egglpant, and bamboo), a plate of pickled things (bamboo, mushrooms, weird paste-thing, weird green thing (possibly celery), weird possibly-root thing), and a plate of condiment-things like pickled chopped green stuff and tiny, tiny whole fish. also a bowl of steamed rice and a bunch of tea. it was quite tasty, but i was stuffed silly by the end of it.
then we went to gion corner, which is in gion (part of kyoto) but not on a corner. they give shows to kind of show foreigners what their traditional arts are like. so we saw a performance of the tea ceremony, a couple kinds of traditional music, a traditional geisha dance, flower arranging, their puppet theater, and the comedy acts that traditionally came between noh plays (but no actual noh for us tonight). we met this guy named matt (i think) from california, who munchkin claims was all disappointed when i said something about "my boyfriend." apparently she thinks he liked me or something. i am oblivious to this sort of thing, so who knows.
after the show, munchkin and i got a more personal demonstration fo the tea ceremony and got to try our hands at making the tea. it's a lot more complicated than just making tea. but it was a lot of fun, and the lady who was teaching us seemed to really like talking to us. (she's been to texas--she really liked the riverwalk in san antonio.)
then munchkin and i walked home. we saw some people with big, fluffy dogs (including a st bernard), so we stopped and made friends. then we got crazy-lost in an industrial part of town and nearly got run over several times as the sidewalk completely and utterly abandoned us. we eventually sorted things out, stopped for a late-night japanese snack run (though how i fit ice cream in on top of all that tofu, i'll never know), and made it home slightly before curfew.
anyhow, tomorrow we should have a pretty long train ride to tokyo.