This place, our funny little house, is cold in the mornings. It opens onto its own internal court yard, behind another house, which it is separated from by a high wooden fence. It is a rabbit warren of housing, to be sure. The neighbours tower above us on the boundary on a few sides, with balconies on the perimeter, although we never see anyone else, or hear anyone else, for that matter.
I’m glad I bought my tracksuit pants with me, even if I haven’t worn them up until now. This morning I did. An essential item is the track suit pant. Sam questions why we can’t be light travellers, like he sees others are? I thought we were being fairly restrained on this trip. Who cares anyway, got a suitcase, fill it. We didn't even do that. We both bought half full suitcases.
We ride from our place into town. No helmets, nobody wears helmets in Japan. The ride is easy, the terrain is flat. Our street heads straight into town, a straight line unbroken. There are no footpaths, just a line painted on the road delineating where pedestrians should walk. The smaller side streets seem to be predominantly one way, I think. (not really sure, to tell you the truth) Bike riders seem to be able to ride in either direction, on either side of the road for that matter, without anyone getting upset about it. We have no idea what the road rules are, we just give way to everyone.
10.15am. We find the market easily, but where to park our bikes? We meet up with an English couple who are having the same problem, there is camaraderie in the same spoken language. We ask someone, who tells us where we can’t park our bikes. Another person points. Another says Daimaru. We head off in the direction of the points and Daimaru, which are in the same direction. We find the blue P sign for parking. There is a whole bike park downstairs for our bikes, just like we have for cars back home. The first 3 hours are free. The bike rack locks your bike in, it will let it go for free if you return in the allocated time. We ask a young guy for the information. The guy from New York told us that. “If you want to know something, as a young Japanese, they are most likely to speak English.”
We head to the market.
I eat a rice cracker with sugar and plum, Sam eats a rice cracker with lavender and wasabi.
No walking and eating. You have to stay in the place you bought it to eat it, no wandering through the market eating. You’d be forgiven if you thought this was for your own safety, but I don’t think it is. It is all for Japans crazy rubbish laws. It is weird, I reckon. There are no rubbish bins, practically, anywhere. The shop of purchase must take the rubbish back from you. But there seems to be no effort put into not creating the rubbish in the first place, with the excessive amount of packaging they allow.
We eat squid and scallops on sticks. A whole octopus with a skewer up its clacker, and scallops seared by a blow torch.
There is a take-away place that is doing pancakes and omelettes out the front, seemingly with a restaurant to eat them in, of which the take away is out the front. However, when we ask the lady serving she says we have to eat the takeaway stuff at the front section, she indicates the space with a swirl of her hands, otherwise we can go into the restaurant and order food. So, we sit down and eat fish and chicken in the restaurant, during which time the same woman is directing people with take into the restaurant to eat. Bitch, we think.
11.30am. We’re walking through the market. I am so bored. Another’s market, yay. The food is amazing, there is no doubt, and I’d be really interested if I could observe it in my own leisurely manner, but the market is packed with people and it is really slow going.
We eat ice creams at one of the many crossroads crossing over the market walk way. The sun is shining. We sit on small stools at the road’s edge. The market walkway ends in a relatively standard issue shopping mall, and our interest wanes.
Midday. We found our first Bookoff, but there isn’t much that I want. I missed the opportunity to get a remastered copy of Love You Live, which I, actually, had in my hand in Tokyo, but put back on the shelf. It was a single CD rather than a double CD and it just didn’t seem like the right thing. It wasn’t until a few days later that I read that the single CD was the latest remastered Japanese version, dam it. I don’t think Kyoto has the population of Tokyo so it won’t have the same variety. It is a simple economics issue. (I think about my economics days at uni)
We walk down to what seems like the main street of Kyoto and walk back towards where we parked the bikes looking at the big shops. It all suddenly seems quite standard issue.
12.30pm. We take our bikes out of the bike park. We don’t have to pay anything, 10.15am to 12.30pm.
We rode home and had a sleep. I don’t know why I was so sleepy, but I was.
We head back into town to look around, not sure what we really want to do. We haven’t really got our Kyoto feet yet. You move from one city to another just after you have got used to the city you are leaving. We could sniff out another BookOff, indeed we could, but we have to buy a train ticket out of here, for Friday before they get booked out. If we couldn’t get back to Narita airport that, of course, would be a disaster.
We catch the metro into town to have a look around. Kyoto metro seems old and dated compared to Tokyo’s, like it has never been updated.
4.45pm. We are in the JR ticket office in Kyoto buying train tickets out of here. It costs us 29,900 yen ($400 approx) to take a train from Kyoto to Narita on Friday. So, it is done.
We come up the escalators to the surface and discover the huge building in which the station is in the basement. It is a pretty amazing building really. Escalators go up and up and up and up right to the top where there is a court yard/deck/square even.
5.15pm. We’re in the fuck off big building over Kyoto Station, which I am sure is a landmark, and is probably famous, but we just stumbled across as we came into town.
5.30pm. We’re eating dipping noodles into ramen 10 stories up.
Apparently, it is okay to eat in department stores, did you know that? It doesn’t always have to be cute cafes and nice restaurants. So Sam tells me a number of times, when I complain about eating in tacky surrounds.
That’s it, nothing much to do for the rest of the day.
We head off to find the BookOff, which takes us across town and out of the CBD. We wander through an ugly neighbourhood, which gets greyer and greyer and uglier and uglier. It just no longer seems like an area where you’d find a BookOff, but Sam insists. We keep walking and the place seems more deserted and uninteresting. This is where you’d get mugged, if it wasn’t Japan. Maybe I am delusional, but I feel like everywhere in Japan is safe to go. Then we turn a corner and there is the orange and blue BookOff sign. Sam gives me that I-told-you-so look. They don’t have anything I want.
So, we head back through the ugly suburb back towards the CBD, but not, we skirt around the outside of it. We cross over one of their ugly big intersections, over one of these ugly, rusty, metal walkways that go in all directions across big intersections.
We keep walking, the light starts to fade. Our feet start to hurt, well, mine do.
We finally come to the Metro Station we are looking for. The Kyoto Metro system is ugly, grey, bleak even. We take a train back to our Metro Station.
There you go, it was a bit of a nothing day. The food in the market is well worth seeing, if you can stomach the crowds.
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