I awoke to the patter of rain. It seemed to ease as I left the Ryokan but the drizzle mist persisted. I decided to explore the station areas that I hadn't got to yesterday. The station is a very big modern building. Above the promenade that Ang and I had sat on the previous day was a garden with views over the city, linked by a skywalk to a garden on the opposite side of the station.
After admiring the view I decided to walk to Gion in the hunt for Geishas and then on to the Philosophy path near the Silver Pavilion. By the time I reached Gion the rain had come back and there was not a single Geisha in sight. I carried on through a park containing various shrines. It's at this point that my map stopped bearing any relationship to reality. I think I broke some kind of personal record cos in total I ended up walking for 5 and a half hours. And I still didn't find the fecking philosophy path. I did however find a number of shrines off the tourist trail and then walked back through several shopping arcades.
I arrived back at a cafe in the station for a quick lunch before heading out to an amusement arcade for a go on the new MarioKart GP arcade. After Blondie and I had shed blood, seat and many tears finishing the Gamecube version I was pretty happy to finish the race in first place. I was less happy when it demanded more money to keep going - surely I play till I lose??!? The Japanese arcades seem very weird - and not in the way I was expecting. Traditional cabinets seem to be out and the majority of space is taken up by those damn grabby machines (I wonder if they're as impossible as in England), horse racing betting games and the novelty controller games (Light guns, taiko, guitar, drums etc). Watching the Japanese schoolboys played the drumming game convinced me that not only did you actually need to be able to play the drums to be good, but it also required the ability of very quick sight reading. I returned to the Ryokan before heading back to Gion. Alas, still no Geishas, but a whole street of doormen trying to entice as many people as possible into various strip clubs...
Monday 22nd May
After another weird night of interrupted sleeping, I was up and dressed by 9. It was Ang's 22nd birthday so I gave her a card and presents and then we headed to the station to sort out our onward travel arrangements. For me this involved booking a shinkansen on to Tokyo and for Ang it involved changing her bus time from 11.30pm to 3.30pm. With this done we set out on the bus to pick up where we left off yesterday.
It was another boiling day and the packed bus didn't help the temperature (9 people give off the same amount of body heat as a bar on an electric fire). Our first stop was Nijo Castle. The reception rooms were well preserved including the famous nightingale floor - purposefully made squeaky so that intruders would register a sound like that of the eponymous bird. What would have happened if the castle were infiltrated during the day when people were walking around anyway? I'm not sure. The spacious gardens and moat full of coi carp were very pleasant to experience before we headed on to the Golden Pavilion. As with much of the other "ancient" buildings of Japan, this one was also reconstructed within the last few years after a disgruntled monk burnt the original to the ground. As expected, the place was packed with tourists, but the classic scene of the temple from across the lake was worth it.
As we walked around, we were accosted by several high school students eager to practice their English. Under the watchful eye of their teacher we were asked our names, where we lived and how long we were in Japan before being asked to write a "message for world peace" in one of their exercise books... Ang suggested we do a tea ceremony - the drinking of a frothed green tea in a certain way before eating a wagashi cake made from sweet bean paste. After enjoying a fantastic strawberries and cream ice cream we set out for our final visit of the day before Ang was due to leave - the Silver Pavilion located on the other side of town. This was a much more peaceful location and the pavilion itself was less garish (and not silver at all). There was a small walk around the site from where we saw the odd sight of a man brushing leaves off the moss bed that covered the ground.
Kyoto is a very strange place - from arrival at the station it seems like any other city in the area but the guidebooks and tourist information make out that it's a peaceful oasis in the wilderness. Try to imagine a more built up version of Cambridge (sort of Cambridge crossed with Birmingham) - the city has continued expanding around all the temples, palaces and shrines. Just as in Cambridge where the touristy colleges are next to large shops, so in Kyoto, UNESCO world heritage sites could be beside an office block. We ate lunch in a small cafe and set out back to the station with seemingly enough time - 50 minutes. From that you can probably guess that the bus got stuck in traffic and duly arrived too late. After Ang had rescheduled her departure back to 11.30 again, we looked around the station's department store and then decided to go to the cinema. The tourist information point us back to Nijo so we took a train and found a modern entertainment complex mixing restaurants, and arcade and cinema. We played around in the arcade for a bit and then watched The Da Vinci Code. If Blondie is reading this - sorry, I've seen it with out you BUT I can tell you it's absolutely toss. In 2 and a half hours nothing happens, Tom Hanks' character doesn't do anything even remotely heroic and I guessed the "twist" after about half an hour. We followed this up with dinner at a strange cafe that was very similar in appearance to the Selfridges store in Birmingham - lot's of plastic in a 70s style. The orange decor and faint taste of citrus in the water could have been easily solved if we'd just realised the place was called the Orange Cafe. I left Angharad at Kyoto station to catch her 11.30 night bus back to Izumo and returned to the Ryokan.
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