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 Stamping my Pilgrim's Passport in a Kyoto Typhoon

calligraphic kanji screen

15.10.2009.Kyoto

私達は東京から京都に私がの前に述べたようにによって弾丸訓練する、超特急ある着いた従って速い景色を読むことを試みる窓を見る種類の病人を得る。私は京都の私達の時間について他のあるノートの下でここに走り書きしたが、今それは2週であり、私達は他のある場所にそれ以来い、今背部家および私はそれの意味を成すことができないし、私が従って私が見るためにちょうどバベル魚日本語のこれおよび続いてきれいな映像を置くためにむしろ言うか、または言った何をとにかく重要ではない & DEspite what i said before [to "form meaning" to this dispatch] it WAS crazy & chaotic [catching the subway to Tokyo STN at rush hour to catch the 9:30 bullet train to Kyoto, where we are now, not LITerally but in the [backlogged] blogging scheme of things [but i already went into that & it doesn't matter anyway as you are likely here to just look at the pretty pictures [either that or i don't know you personally anyway & if i do i'll tell you what went down in person... ]] 重|日E|ーLト|下 |い|重X||ート|下Z |い|Y|日|ート|下 |い| ||

we left most of our baggage in the hotel back in Tokyo, just a whirlwind 2-day jaunt to Kyoto | got a few essentials at a Muji-to-go, one of our favorite stores anywhere | we weren't able to get a hotel in Kyoto ahead as everything was booked so we didn't know what to expect | it would've been nice to stay in a traditional Ryokan but you need to be thinking ahead for such things & we couldn't exactly be choosers & the only place [that a travel agent at the station in Kyoto could find] was the Hotel Granvia, conveniently right above us in the train station | normally saying "we stayed at the train station" might conjure crashing on cold marble floors with baggage stored in a locker or a divey airport hotel but this was far from that & the train station was beyond just a normal train station | here, i'll start by just showing you some photos of the station/complex to give you the idea:

if only i thought to record the high school marching bands dueling it out
here in the rain in this very spot the next day ...

kyoto station

 

our accommodation was somewhere up above all this with the trains coming in & out

hotel granvia

 

not sure why our balcony had 3 square holes in it ...
this was our view when we weren't busy seeing Kyoto

view from hotel granvia

first order of business was ramen, which we were told was on the 9th level [like some sort of video game] which meant taking that outside escalator up 9 flights & going through a doorway marked "そして次に他のテキストの&の束; 単語、グリフ私達は英語に書かれヌードルだけ読むことができ[、覚えているかどれがについて話す: ヌードルを尊重しなさい!" & sure enough, inside was seriously a dozen places specializing in nothing but ramen ... as close to heaven as you can get if buddhists believed in such things | this is what my [miso] ramen LOOKed like anyway ...

ramen in Kyoto station

bellies full of ramen we set out to explore Kyoto | Kyoto is almost overwhelming there are so many temples & shrines & pagodas & things to see | it is mind-boggling | we are used to getting a map of a city & getting a sense of it in a day, but once we started correlating real space & landmarks with our map, it was really quite astonishing how little turf we had covered & to be honest it was hard to keep it all straight & looking through the photos now it's hard to tell what's what & most of the time there were no signs in English anyway telling us what we were looking at [which is fine with me] |

there is this cool tradition in Japan where you buy this hardbound accordion style book with blank pages & as you visit each temple there's a monk stationed there that will stamp your book with that temple's emblem [in red] & then ink in some calligraphy over it, unique to each temple, a sort of temple signature or meme, to prove you'd been there | a sort of buddhist passport | some Japanese pilgrims had dozens, hundreds of pages filled in their temple books, i only managed to get about ten [the calligraphic monks were not always easy to find] | just more reason to go back to Japan to keep filling it in | here's a few entries from my pilgrim's book object to give you the idea ...

temple stamps & calligraphy

 

you can also buy these sorts of stamps, or have one made especially for yourself ...

temple stamps

 

or you can get these pre-made slips of paper that as far as i could tell were prayers of some sort stamped on these slips which you then tied to a tree or placed in the shrine or something [but i kept mine, i hope that's not bad luck or something [the one on the left is actually from Senso-ji in Tokyo]]:

temple prayers

i'm sure they say something dumb like "haha gaijin sucker," but i don't care, I AM a sucker for how text looks regardless of meaning ...

chicken-wired text

Japanese vizpo

 

wood-burnt text

woodgrain visual poetry

 

no idea what

textual jap

 

[not sure what this is/was either, but it's destined to be a book cover
if someone writes the book to go with it]

Kyoto grafffiti

the first temple complex we went to was Sanju Sangen-do, which is this massive endless lodge made of wood [& mind you they don't use any nails in all this... ]

Sanjusangendo

inside there were 1001 Buddha statues, sort of like the terra cotta warriors, but bronze and each with dozens of arms and halos | it was really sumthing | you aren't supposed to take photos of the buddhas inside but here's one i snuck through the doorway & that's the scribe-monk who signed my book ...

1001 buddhas

we saw a bunch of other temples & shrines, i can't remember the names of all of them, especially now after the fact | at sunset we ended up on the winding alleys leading up to Jishu-jinja, up at the base of mountains ||

armies of students visiting the temples

school girls at temple

 

another forbidden peak

jisuh-jinja buddha

once it was dark & we couldn't see anymore, we wandered down into the Gion district, where all the geishas & artists & aristocrats used to hang out | bricked alleys with perfect little wood houses & expensive kaiseki restaurants, everything just so precious you feel bad for even being [with jeans & t-shirt] in the landscape | for dinner we ended up at some yakitori dive along the river [in the ponto-cho district, what used to be the high-end red light district] | the cooks & waitstaff wore rubber boots there was so much oil & grease on floor, but oh, was it good ...

shishito peppers & katsuo-bushi [shaved & dried bonito that shrivels & curls before your eyes]

Shiso peppers

 

shrine lanterns

16.10.2009.Kyoto

we took the subway up to Gion to start the day where we left off the day before, starting with Chion-in, whose amazing zen rock gardens stood out | again, the distances were great & there seemed to be unmarked temples & shrines & giant buddhas around every corner | i think we ended up on the so-called philosophers path [though there was little time for philosophizing] eventually to Ginkaku-ji [though it's infamous silver pagoda was under reconstruction] | my only complaint about Kyoto or Japan in general, was that we had to go home, that our time there was finite | 2 days is not nearly enough | we were like a typhoon blowing through, only seeing a snapshot of everything, at a particular moment in time | memories bunching up on each other | no time for contemplating, trying to capture it all in your mind to digest later | in no particular order here's some memory-triggering images from the day ...

 

jamps

 

tourists in their own land

geisha poseurs

 

even geishas can be tourists

Geisha rickshaw

 

stupa-fied temple

stupa

 

 

forbidden interior

 

horsetails & bamboo

horsetail texture

 

signature metallic roof tiled eaves

shrine eaves

 

redwoods & aquaduct

redwood arches

 

it is what it is

written in stone

 

zen rock garden

 

just one plate of a 10+ course kaiseki meal we had at kyomachiya-suishin on Ponto-cho street

Kaiseki

 

sunsetting on Kyoto ... sad

lantern shadows

 

orange picket fence

 

another morning in Kyoto & back to Tokyo ...

 

 

(c) 2009 Derek White

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