Gion

Tonight for the first time we ate a Japanese meal without the benefit of any of the following:

– an English menu
– a picture menu
– plastic models of food we could point to when ordering (I don’t know who makes these, but they have them for everything, including non-Japanese food like pizza)
– restaurant staff able to explain our meal to us using verbal communication, written communication, pantomime, interpretive dance or any other means.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Today, though having still a long list of things we wanted to do in Kyoto before we leave tomorrow, we decided to spend the morning shopping. Being surrounded by beautiful things didn’t help, and by the time we got back to the ryokan to deposit our purchases it was quite late in the day.

However, since for the first time in Kyoto we had invested in all-day bus passes, we had some motivation for getting around to different parts of the city. Sim had been quite keen to see a temple called Kinkaku-ji, also known as the Golden Pavillion (as it’s covered in gold). It certainly was covered in gold, no doubt about that. Gold is what it was covered in.

Having seen the Golden Pavillion in all its gold-covered glory, we faced a dilemma. I had been wanting to go to Gion, on the other side of the city, for some time before coming to Kyoto. It’s a more traditional part of the city, with cobbled streets and old-fashioned Japanese houses and buildings, and it’s also the most likely place to spot geisha. But we had this choice: go back to our ryokan to get changed, so we’d be fit for dinner (Sim had his huge backpack with all his camera gear), or go straight to Gion, get there around the beginning of the evening (geisha-spotting time), then go back and get changed for dinner afterwards. We went with the latter option.

As soon as we got to Gion I began to feel that we’d made a mistake. The place was crawling with tourists, cameras at the ready, all obviously and unashamedly hoping to see geisha. It was slightly sickening. I felt almost like I had at Taronga zoo, trying to spot the snow leopards while they tried to get some sleep behind a rock. It was a bit weird to be treating human beings like that. After walking around for ten minutes or so, I got to the point of wanting to leave, and was just saying so to Sim when, behind him, a maiko (apprentice geisha, but still with the white face and red lips and the whole kit) appeared out of an alley behind him, crossed the road, and disappeared into another alley on the other side. So, in spite of myself, I had my geisha sighting.

After a much needed change of top and depositing of heavy equipment, we went back to Gion for dinner, and here’s where I started this post. It was the meal I’d been wanting to have since we came to Japan, and I have no idea what a large chunk of it even was. What I do know is that it was a ten-course, set menu meal, and had a lot of fish in it. I kept the menu, so if anyone can read Japanese and tell me what I ate, they’re welcome to do so. It’s also not true to say that the staff couldn’t tell us what any of it was, because they told us that the sushi and sashimi were sushi and sashimi. Since, however, that was the identifiable part of the meal, it didn’t take us very far.

It was all beautifully presented, though, which is one thing you can’t help noticing about Japanese food: even the most hole-in-the-wall noodle bar will present dishes in servingware of different colours and shapes depending on what you order. As for the food itself, we ate what looked like slices of the tiniest of fish roe, little green balls that may have been either processed nuts or quail eggs or something altogether different, something I swear was cold raw egg soup (not my favourite course), sushi and sashimi that has forever ruined all other sushi and sashimi for me, some cousins of the unidentifiable pickles from the Nishiki markets the other day, and a parade of others. Even dessert was difficult to place: it included pannacotta and ice-cream, but the flavour was so subtle I’m still not sure what it was. The pannacotta may have been slightly citrussy, and the ice-cream almost tasted like wattleseed.

So now I’ve had a proper mystery Japanese meal and got through everything (almost – I didn’t finish the raw egg thing but I’m glad I saved the room for dessert, though it was the only non-Japanese part of the meal). It was lovely coming out into the almost deserted alleyway lit up with lanterns afterwards, too. Once all the tourists had dissipated, it was easy to see why Gion was such an attraction in the first place.