Kyoto II: Return to Kyoto

Tofu Donuts

I do not know, dear reader, whether you have yet investigated the Go! channel via your digital tuner. If, like me, you’ve turned it on during the day just to see, you’ll know that it plays repeats of The Nanny for the edification of bored housewives.

Well, that’s pretty much how it feels to be here in Nagoya: it seems to be entirely populated by women (and indeed men) with improbable shoes and enormous teased hair. Being our last full day in Japan, we had a lot of shopping to finalise before making the trip back, and we thought Nagoya would be perfect, being a shopper’s paradise.

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The Torii Walk

Fushimi Inari

We had a long list of things we had half planned on doing in Kyoto, and most of them didn’t happen. We didn’t get to the Imperial Palace, or see Ryoanji’s famous dry garden. I even had to miss out on the Manga museum, and the cinema dedicated to the works of Tezuka Osamu (creator of Astro Boy). But one thing I refused to miss was the walk to the Fushimi Inari shrine, even if it meant waking up at 5:30am.

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Gion

Gion Restaurant

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.

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