Masks

Swine Flu had its 15 minutes of fame here, and so did the masks. (The sign above says one mask per person)

Dinner Pt. 2

This is from a gathering at a friend's apartment a few weeks. It was actually only people from the UCs that were there. But they're all pretty good cooks.

End of the Road/Matsuo Shrine

A few weeks ago I had a free day (which are rarer than I expected), and decided to take a bike ride down one of the huge streets I live near, in search of a venue that a band I like was planning on playing at. The name of the street is 四条 (Shi-jou, "4th Street") and it runs east-west for quite a while. If I head east from where I live, I'll cross the Kamo River right away, head through the tradional/touristy area known as Gion, and then after about half a mile get to Yasaka Shrine, which is where Shi-jou ends in that direction. However, if I head west, which I did in search of this venue, I'll go through more shopping areas, big buildings, and crowded streets. I eventually found this venue, but decided once I was there to just keep on going until Shi-jou ended, since after all, it had to end at some point. It took me past more big buildings, the beginnings of some kind of street fair, and then gradually into a more residential area. I eventually came to a huge bridge that crossed the Katsura River, which was when I took the picture below.


So I crossed this huge bridge, and a few minutes later finally came to the end of Shi-jou. I was also pleased to find a pretty good-sized shrine there tucked at the feet of some mountains. As I said, I had no idea where the end of Shi-jou was nor what was there, so finding Matsuo Shrine at the end of my odyssey was quite poetic.



The shrine was really beautiful, which added to the whole experience. The pictures show it a little, but behind and around most of Matsuo Shrine is a forest and some mountains. It kind of reminded me of some Hayao Miyazaki films, which I highly recommend if you've never seen any. They're all animated, and lots of scenes take place in forests with traditional spirits interacting with children from the regular world.




As you can see from most of the pictures, the sky was a thick grey, which I should have noticed at the time. The majority of my hour long bike ride back was in the rain, but that too, in an odd way, added to the whole adventure of going there and heading back, etc. etc. I stopped at a grocery store on the way home and picked up a bitter melon, since the smaller grocery store by my apartment doesn't have carry any. Since then, I've gone to that grocery store again to pick up other things my grocery store doesn't have, which ended being mostly snacks :)

The Kyoto Psycho

So I recently met this old Japanese guy who some of us are now calling The Kyoto Psycho. He's harmless, but pretty annoying. Here's what he seems to do pretty consistently: approach a foreign looking person, ask them in English where they're from, and then he says he lived there or near there for some period of time. It's a bit of a stretch, but I might have actually believed him had he just said a few places. But every one of my friends seem to have met this guy, and he always says that he's lived somewhere near where they're from. He's lived in Long Beach, London, Ann Arbor, West Covina, Scotland, San Jose, etc. etc. Had he just lied about living in these places I would probably only think of him as a liar, but he also gets angry if you speak back to him in Japanese. I actually didn't know who he was, and only spoke Japanese to him, and kept on speaking Japanese even though he claimed to not understand me, and while he was walking away, he shouted at me "You can't speak English!". Uhhhh, okay.

On the bus to Nagoya

So I took a bus to Nagoya yesterday (and one back last night), which takes about two and a half hours each way. I killed time by reading my paper back of short stories, napping, and ofcourse listening to my iPod while staring out the window. I realized that the music of Nick Drake goes incredibly well with watching rice paddies and farm houses go by at 75 kilometers per hour. The song I really fell in love with was Man In A Shed, which demonstrates Nick Drake's skillful finger-picking on the guitar, and also has a very cool piano solo (I'm not sure if he played it himself). You can listen to Man In A Shed on YouTube, so check it out here: Nick Drake - Man In A Shed
I first heard Nick Drake on the soundtrack of The Royal Tenenbaums. His song, like all songs on that soundtrack, is very good, and was very well used in the movie. I didn't become a big fan of his until my friend Adam gave me all of his works last year. Thanks to that, I was really able to enjoy that bus ride yesterday. Here's a link to his song from The Royal Tenenbaums: Nick Drake - Fly
Nagoya was cool, but also kind of accurately demonstrated itself as the big city in Japan that isn't famous for anything, which in fact, is what it's famous for. But it was cool walking around and checking it all out. It's bigger than Kyoto and Osaka, but doesn't have the crazy overwhelming attack-on-all-your-senses power that Osaka and Tokyo have. The local food to have there is said to be Miso Katsu, but we couldn't find any restaurants with it, so we settled for regular katsu, which is always really good anyway. If you've never had katsu, you MUST, it's very very good.

Dinner

Dinner = kabocha (a kind of pumpkin), kimchee, rice

Aoi Matsuri

The Aoi Matsuri (which means Blue Festival) is the quietest and calmest festival of the many festivals there are in Japan. It involves young people (especially ones of high-class and good taste!) dressing up in very traditional clothing and make-up. The color blue is generally associated with youth over here, and also coming of age, and spring as a season is very much associated with new beginnings. Blue=Youth=Coming of Age=Spring. They, along with some older people, walk in a parade like fashion very very slowly, apparently around the city of Kyoto. We all caught the festivities at the source, since they start at the Imperial Palace, which is across the street from my university. The point of this festival is to display one of the things one of the gods will be living in for this year. This is it:

There's also an ambulance back there, but I don't think that serves any traditional or symbolic purpose. Unless the tradition is needing to be saved, which doesn't require an ambulance if you ask a missionary, but requires god, which is also present in this picture. The spiritually complicated Japan strikes again.