Ordered my usual chai latte, which tastes exactly the same as it does in America. Robert had a sakura frappachino and a sakura steamed bun--the latter with a pickled cherry blossom--both of which turned out to be quite delish. The bun had matcha filling near the bottom as well...Back home at Starbucks, and most other coffee shops, when autumn comes around, the seasonal flavor is pumpkin. Here, in spring, it's sakura.
We started where we'd been before in Gion, at Yasaka-jinja and Maruyama-kouen. The weather was much more amiable this time around: it was a beautiful, cool, sunny day, and there were a number of new and interesting sights that day.
So it turned out there was a market in Gion that Saturday, with a good number of the same vendors we saw at the other fairs. I'm not sure if it's the same deal where they all show up at Yasaka-jinja on a certain day of the month. I have a feeling it had more to do with it being the first Saturday people were going out to hanami. Up in Maruyama-kouen, people were setting out tarps, already having their bento pre-lunchtime.
A game at one of the little vendors (photo courtesy of Robert)
The shidare-zakura, once again, with feeling
We wandered through Maruyama-kouen again, ventured up to a couple of temples in the hills where people were paying their respects. Some kind of religious service was going on in one of the buildings...We also walked by a couple of graveyards. They're not at all like Western graveyards--if that fact was not already previously established by the discovery of a Hello Kitty tombstone. I think they are made out of the same kind of stone as Western tombstones, but Japanese gravestones are typically taller and thinner. Also, these graveyards were set on a hill, so each row going back is slightly more elevated than the one before it. Some areas of the graveyard even look like all the headstones are exactly the same--and perhaps that wasn't just my imagination.
A sight I found rather wabi-sabi...
Looking out at the city from a very quiet, peaceful temple where I had my nokyo-cho signed...
We took a long stroll back through the park, and made our way past a shrine, a small park, and another graveyard up to another small temple. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be at this second temple, but we did discover that it was devoted to a goddess of music. (I seem to be having a bit of trouble actually finding the names of these couple of temples, but I'll probably return to the area at some point and check; it's such a gorgeous area to wander around in for hours.)
The ravens here are very large and quite amusing. They sound a little strange--very different from American crows.
Their noises are a bit more like people when they caw too, kind of like Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.
A small Buddhist meditation we passed walking around--they picked the perfect day, too
A closer look at the graves on the path up towards the temple devoted to the music goddess
The amazing view from atop the graveyard towards the city again...
Back through the park again...
As we walked back through Yasaka-Jinja, we realized something was about to happen when we saw two miko making preparations. The other big hints were the guys in suits who were clearly shouting at the crowds of people to stand to the sides of the pathways because people were about to come through.
We were so lucky just to happen by a Shinto wedding procession.I think most of the people there didn't know to expect a wedding that day (and we weren't the only tourists stopping to take photos of the event.) Once it looked like the actual ceremony was starting, we meandered back down towards the main road, out of the shrine, to stroll down Gion's shopping streets. We passed a number of very interesting shops.
The first was a gemstone /mineral shop, with both raw and carved specimans, jewelry, and even small statuettes. Robert bought a pair of little black maneki neko, one for happiness, and one for money. Black maneki neko are conveniently also talismans against evil.
We turned down a smaller side street, walked down and back, and stopped in a couple of other little places carrying things like stationary, traditional handicrafts, textiles, even a store specializing in indigo-dyed goods. The aizome goods in that last store were very, very expensive.
After that amazing and gorgeous exploration of the Gion area, Robert went to go meet Ben for the aforementioned dinner with various Judo masters and practitioners, and I stayed near the Shijo-Karasuma subway station and looking for a bookstore I'd seen nearby one night. I wandered down all 4 arms of the intersection for a ways, searching for something familiar--anything that looked like what we'd passed a few nights earlier. Eventually I asked a couple of people, and the second young woman actually walked me to the nearest bookstore, which was quite close by and above a Tommy Hilfiger shop. She was very kind to go out of her way, even a little bit, to show me, I thought.
And then I wandered around some more--inside the bookstore, this time. I still don't really understand how they shelve the books in Japan. They do group them by genre and type, but as far as I can tell, there's no "alphabetical" (or phonetically, in the case of Japanese) organization that I can ever see. I walked through the shelves of manga, seeing what I could read of the katakana. And I looked and looked around in the fiction for Harry Potter. Again, after a while, I acknowledged defeat and asked a store clerk. Turns out all the Harry Potter books are in the children's section...even though I'd argue the books are age-appropriate according to the ages of the characters throughout the series, pretty much. I decided on buying Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Japanese, since it was the cheapest of the hardbacks, and all the paperbacks had abstract and non-illustrative covers. So I believe that makes 3 Harry Potter books we have in different languages (excluding English): the first in Japanese, the third in Spanish, and the fourth in Swedish.Mission complete: Buy a Harry Potter book in 日本語.
Thoroughly satisfied, I headed back to the guesthouse for what I thought was some well-deserved rest for the rest of the evening. A few of hours later I get an email from Ben telling me he hoped my stuff was packed. About 20 minutes later Ben and Robert showed up with a taxi; we needed to drop most of my luggage off at the International House that night, since we were going to be leaving for Osaka the next day and Ben would be busy. Luckily I was pretty much all packed up, except for a couple of things I'd set aside for what was essentially a day trip for me. We carefully, carefully, got my huge violet suitcase down the steep stairs, easily took down the duffel bag, tossed them in the taxi trunk, and hopped in. We got everything over alright, the taxi cab driver was very nice and chatted with us a little, left my luggage just inside the building, and headed back to the nearest subway station. The guys said their tearless, manly goodbyes, and we returned to the guesthouse, finished packing, and retired.
