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April 26: Travel to Kyoto
Apr. 28th, 2012 09:43 pmPreviously, we’d gone for our breakfasts at the Richmond Hotel, which offered the combination of one of five small fixed breakfast meals (e.g., broiled salmon, chicken egg drop soup) plus a small but satisfying buffet, and unlimited (and very good) coffee. Like all the restaurant coffee we’ve had thus far, it was freshly ground and brewed on demand, but the cups are small (about half a typical Western coffee mug). Today we tried the Tokyu hotel as an alternative. Nothing special to report, though good for the price; though they had no fixed meal and only a small buffet, they also had unlimited good coffee, and it was a satisfying meal. We returned to the Nunoya ryokan to pack our bags, said goodbye to our hostess, hiked to the JR station, found our platform, and sat and people-watched while we waited for our train.
Today was a short trip: a couple hours to Nagoya on a local limited express (i.e., fewer stops than the full “stop at every road crossing” milk run but more stops than a full express), followed by half an hour on a shinkansen to Kyoto. We’re not yet blasé about Japan Rail, but we’re getting pretty comfortable with finding our way around stations and expressing our needs well enough in Japanese that we have no trouble reserving seats when necessary. Japan Rail has done an excellent job of labeling their stations, both from inside when you’re looking for the right track and from outside when your train pulls up to the platform and you want to see where you are, so once you get past the initial fear of using a foreign transport system, and the paralysis it can bring, it’s not hard to find your way around. Between Shoshanna and me, we spot all the track and station signs quickly and don’t waste much time wandering around in circles, and we haven’t yet missed a stop or a train. (Missing a train can be costly if you reserved a seat because you’re required to pay for the seat you didn’t use, since presumably someone else could have used it. Thus far the trains have been sufficiently empty that’s a purely academic point, but it does motivate us to not miss a train.)
This proficiency gives us time to relax and enjoy the view, and to do things like eating at a real restaurant instead of scarfing down whatever we can hold in one hand once we’re in a station between trains. At Nagoya, we had time to find a pleasant little restaurant for lunch, and had roast pork and dumplings (gyoza) for lunch, washed down with a beer, before returning to the departures area and getting on our shinkansen. After the local express, shinkansens really fly—they feel even faster than the TGV in France, and it’s a pleasure to zip around Japan at warp speed.
Kyoto station is huge: I’ve been in smaller international airports, or so it felt. Still, apart from having some trouble finding the tourist information center, we had no problems finding the right local train to take us to western Kyoto, where we’d be staying at a zen Buddhist temple. We started our stay in Kyoto in the Myoshin-ji temple complex. It’s an interesting mixture of the old and the new, as is so much of Japan. On the one hand, you have these old temples, many that are hundreds of years old; on the other, the priests drive late-model cars, and the temple we’re staying at (Shunkoin temple) is set up for high-speed wi-fi access and we’re staying in brand-new guest rooms with a high-tech wash-olet toilet and private shower. We arrived in plenty of time for a pre-dinner shower before heading out for dinner.
Dinner was to be okonomis at a small neighborhood joint just east of the north gate of the temple complex. We found the place with no difficulty, and got there just before all the neighborhood folk arrived, so we got a table instantly. (Within 15 or 20 minutes after we sat, the bench by the door was filled with local people waiting for a table.) Interestingly, the owner came up to us, pointed at the menu (only in Japanese), said “okonomi?”, and made apologetic noises that there was no English menu. He seemed quite relieved when we made enthusiastic “hai” (yes) noises and knew the words for beef (gyu-niku) and pork (buta-niku) and a few other relevant words. (It says much that one of the first words I learn in any new culture is the word for beer, which is “biru” in Japanese.)
Nobody seemed excessively amused or put off by the presence of two strangers in their midst, and I didn’t notice anyone casting us surreptitious glances to see how we were faring. Possibly because we seemed to fit right in, and didn’t ask for forks or special treatment. Each table had its own grill, set in the center of one of those low Japanese tables where you sit on cushions, so we got to cook our own okonomi—sort of, kind of. We were each handed a large tin cup filled with cabbage, onions, eggs, batter, and our meat of choice (beef for me, pork for Shoshanna), and shown by pantomime that we should stir it with the provided spoon. Once it was whipped up, one of the cooks came by, swabbed the grill with grease, and glopped the mixture onto the grill. We watched it cook, sweating from the heat of the grill, and just when we were thinking of flipping it, the cook returned and did the job for us. I’m not sure whether this was just kindness to gaijin, but I don’t think so, because I saw him helping out other diners.
One interesting twist: I pantomimed “just a bit”, so we got the traditional dollop of sweet mayo instead of the bucket that we got in Toyama, but the cook offered us a choice of regular, sweet, and hot sauce; I hadn’t been aware there were any options other than sweet. We both chose sweet, and the cook dropped on the mayo and sweet sauce, then swished them around to mix the two and cover the whole okonomi. We were then left alone to cut and serve ourselves the meal, which was yummy and stayed piping hot on the grill. My mid-year’s resolution: I need to learn how to make okonomis at home.
A short walk home to our temple, stopping for a couple ice creams at local depanneurs along the way. The first was better, an ice cream cone with chocolate lining the inside and vanilla ice cream; the second was chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream, and was nothing special. The only sour note was that the wall separating our room from our neighbors is thin and poses no barrier to sound, and our neighbors possibly didn’t realize how easily sound passes through the walls. Nothing terribly embarrassing (or interesting) to report, but there really wasn’t much privacy.
Today was a short trip: a couple hours to Nagoya on a local limited express (i.e., fewer stops than the full “stop at every road crossing” milk run but more stops than a full express), followed by half an hour on a shinkansen to Kyoto. We’re not yet blasé about Japan Rail, but we’re getting pretty comfortable with finding our way around stations and expressing our needs well enough in Japanese that we have no trouble reserving seats when necessary. Japan Rail has done an excellent job of labeling their stations, both from inside when you’re looking for the right track and from outside when your train pulls up to the platform and you want to see where you are, so once you get past the initial fear of using a foreign transport system, and the paralysis it can bring, it’s not hard to find your way around. Between Shoshanna and me, we spot all the track and station signs quickly and don’t waste much time wandering around in circles, and we haven’t yet missed a stop or a train. (Missing a train can be costly if you reserved a seat because you’re required to pay for the seat you didn’t use, since presumably someone else could have used it. Thus far the trains have been sufficiently empty that’s a purely academic point, but it does motivate us to not miss a train.)
This proficiency gives us time to relax and enjoy the view, and to do things like eating at a real restaurant instead of scarfing down whatever we can hold in one hand once we’re in a station between trains. At Nagoya, we had time to find a pleasant little restaurant for lunch, and had roast pork and dumplings (gyoza) for lunch, washed down with a beer, before returning to the departures area and getting on our shinkansen. After the local express, shinkansens really fly—they feel even faster than the TGV in France, and it’s a pleasure to zip around Japan at warp speed.
Kyoto station is huge: I’ve been in smaller international airports, or so it felt. Still, apart from having some trouble finding the tourist information center, we had no problems finding the right local train to take us to western Kyoto, where we’d be staying at a zen Buddhist temple. We started our stay in Kyoto in the Myoshin-ji temple complex. It’s an interesting mixture of the old and the new, as is so much of Japan. On the one hand, you have these old temples, many that are hundreds of years old; on the other, the priests drive late-model cars, and the temple we’re staying at (Shunkoin temple) is set up for high-speed wi-fi access and we’re staying in brand-new guest rooms with a high-tech wash-olet toilet and private shower. We arrived in plenty of time for a pre-dinner shower before heading out for dinner.
Dinner was to be okonomis at a small neighborhood joint just east of the north gate of the temple complex. We found the place with no difficulty, and got there just before all the neighborhood folk arrived, so we got a table instantly. (Within 15 or 20 minutes after we sat, the bench by the door was filled with local people waiting for a table.) Interestingly, the owner came up to us, pointed at the menu (only in Japanese), said “okonomi?”, and made apologetic noises that there was no English menu. He seemed quite relieved when we made enthusiastic “hai” (yes) noises and knew the words for beef (gyu-niku) and pork (buta-niku) and a few other relevant words. (It says much that one of the first words I learn in any new culture is the word for beer, which is “biru” in Japanese.)
Nobody seemed excessively amused or put off by the presence of two strangers in their midst, and I didn’t notice anyone casting us surreptitious glances to see how we were faring. Possibly because we seemed to fit right in, and didn’t ask for forks or special treatment. Each table had its own grill, set in the center of one of those low Japanese tables where you sit on cushions, so we got to cook our own okonomi—sort of, kind of. We were each handed a large tin cup filled with cabbage, onions, eggs, batter, and our meat of choice (beef for me, pork for Shoshanna), and shown by pantomime that we should stir it with the provided spoon. Once it was whipped up, one of the cooks came by, swabbed the grill with grease, and glopped the mixture onto the grill. We watched it cook, sweating from the heat of the grill, and just when we were thinking of flipping it, the cook returned and did the job for us. I’m not sure whether this was just kindness to gaijin, but I don’t think so, because I saw him helping out other diners.
One interesting twist: I pantomimed “just a bit”, so we got the traditional dollop of sweet mayo instead of the bucket that we got in Toyama, but the cook offered us a choice of regular, sweet, and hot sauce; I hadn’t been aware there were any options other than sweet. We both chose sweet, and the cook dropped on the mayo and sweet sauce, then swished them around to mix the two and cover the whole okonomi. We were then left alone to cut and serve ourselves the meal, which was yummy and stayed piping hot on the grill. My mid-year’s resolution: I need to learn how to make okonomis at home.
A short walk home to our temple, stopping for a couple ice creams at local depanneurs along the way. The first was better, an ice cream cone with chocolate lining the inside and vanilla ice cream; the second was chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream, and was nothing special. The only sour note was that the wall separating our room from our neighbors is thin and poses no barrier to sound, and our neighbors possibly didn’t realize how easily sound passes through the walls. Nothing terribly embarrassing (or interesting) to report, but there really wasn’t much privacy.