Kyoto

Japan, Life, Travel Comments (0)

Day 8 (Wednesday): More photos here. Of course my hotel room’s internet line isn’t working, whereas everyone else who didn’t bring a laptop is in a room where it works great. I begged one of the students to use her line while she’s downstairs….

One week in Japan, and I’ve spent about $300 on meals and transportation, mostly, and a handful of stamps and postcards. Vending machine drinks and single-line train tickets cost about 1,200 yen a pop, which is easy to call $1.20 but is really rather more, since the yen-to-dollar is 1,000-to-0.80, not 1,000-to-1. So things add up quickly!

We’ll be spending five days based in Kyoto’s Super Hotel, the same chain I’ll be in when I’m staying in Osaka; it’s inexpensive but clean. The (Western-style) rooms are small but there’s free breakfast and you can use the hotel’s laundry machines, borrow an iron, get internet on the lobby computers, rent PCs for your room, and otherwise get whatever you need if you’re traveling light and not planning to spend much time in your room.

A few of the things I’ve come to appreciate in Japan: All the vending machines, especially the ones with cans of hot and cold coffee. Good coffee without waiting in lines, paying extortionate prices, or sitting down is awesome! The beer and “Magic D” drink vending machines are also great. I don’t know what “Magic D” is really called; it’s a tiny brown glass bottle with a white and blue label that has a big red “D” in the middle. The Japanese consider it medicinal; an energy drink full of caffeine and Vitamin B and amino acids and who-knows-what-else. Great stuff. Heated toilet seats, even in public buildings, are also pretty awesome. Assuming you can get toilet seats, but I’ve run into very few places so far in which the only options were squats…. Incredibly clean trains. Leaving shoes in the lobby and wearing slippers in the hotel. Freshly pressed yukatas in the bedrooms. Traditional hot, deep bathing facilities. A great — if daunting to anyone who doesn’t read hiragana or kanji — mass transit system. Cleanliness. Politeness.

Anyway … we visited Nijyo Castle today, which is actually a palace, since it was designed for the Tokugawa shogun to live in rather than to fight from. Relatively little of it could be entered; just one main building and the gardens, and you aren’t allowed to take photos or even sketch inside the main building. However, it had a nightengale floor — that’s the wooden floor that chirps when you walk across it, to prevent assassins from sneaking around — so I turned on the SoundPaper app in my iPad and recorded it while we walked on it. Eventually I’ll edit the sound and post it here; the lack of wireless in Japan makes transferring files from the iPad to my computer impossible, as far as I can tell.

drupagliassotti @ May 26, 2010