Climing up a mountain

All over Japan near shrines you can find what are called torii gates, which are usually either red and made of wood, or stone.  He's an example of one.  Oh yeah, I saw that one up close when I was there too, but it's a pretty extreme example as usually they aren't that gigantic.  Usually you only see one gate by itself, but that wasn't the case on my last day to Kyoto.  The last place I saw at Kyoto is a pretty famous place.  Perhaps people have seen pictures of it before? Fushimi Inari is a shrine built up a mountain, and the distinguishing feature is just how many of those gates it has.

Now I didn't get to climb up any other mountain during my time in Japan.  Originally I wanted to go climb Fuji but I realized that I didn't have the hiking gear or a nice coat that would make it safe.  Fushimi Inari on the other hand doesn't need any special gear, just a couple hours of your time and a camera to take great pictures of the spot.

I wanted to climb this mountain early on during our visits to Kyoto, but we weren't really in good shape for that most of the time.  All of the walking that kyoto required left david in a state where climbing wasn't an option.  But I didn't fare any better, as I ended up with blood-filled blisters on my feet from walking, which would make the climb painful and slow.  But I think there was one day where we really didn't see very much so that we could rest instead.  After that, we took off for the mountain.

The main thing to see there, I think, is the thousands of gates.  Because of that, instead of reading my description of the place its probably best to take a look at the pictures and videos I took.  I took a video of almost all the climb up to show the sheer amount of gates on this mountain, and it definitely is in contrast to a normal shrine.  With as many gates as there were, parts of the trail seem less like a collection of gates and more like a tunnel.  As for the reason there are so many gates - people are able to pay to get a gate put up in their name, and you can see the owners names written on each.  I think the gates are pretty expensive though, up in the thousands of dollars.  However apparently for those who can't afford that, there are mini gates that are about the size of someone's hand or head.  At the very top of the mountain I saw hundreds of these mini gates.

There wasn't only one path up the mountain however.  There were paths going out from the main one we took, and on these paths there were spots that looked significant, but I really had no idea what they were.  Some locations made me think they were graves or mini shrines to minor gods.  Other locations looked to be donation boxes and prayer areas.  I took a picture of most of the interesting looking spots on the mountain but I can't really say much about what they were.

The mountain wasn't a very steep climb most of the time, but it varied and I was pretty tired on the way up so it was slow going.  I remember that halfway up the mountain there was an area with a few buildings.  Shops and surprisingly even homes.  I'd hate to be someone that had to supply the shops, as it would mean taking an hour or so walk up a mountain as far as I know.

On my way back down, because I was slow climbing, it was getting dark.  I ended up getting separated from david but I didn't think it was a problem because all I had to do was go down to get to the bottom of the mountain, or so I thought.  Turns out there were forks in some of the paths, and I took the one that went downward partially because it seemed like the best way to get down, and also because I saw a cat and followed it to take pictures.  I ended up at a dead end 10 minutes later with nobody in sight, so that was bad but I figured I could just call david up on the cell phone to tell him I would take a while to catch up.  While backtracking to the fork I previously saw, I came across a lady outside of what must have been her home (imagine living on this mountain!) and she told me to go on the path that went upward, as it did eventually go down, and that's the path I wanted.  Oh well.  I think the cat that I saw was hers, too.  She had a few cats around her house.

At the halfway point with a resting area and shops, I got to take some pictures of the city from above.  A nice night view, but I don't think the pictures came out as good as what I saw in person.  At any rate, it's better to see the mountain than to explain it in words, so go take a look at the videos I took!

Even more pictures!

If you just love viewing thousands and thousands  of pictures, you'll love the fact that I just added a link on the side of my page to my friend David's images.  Between the two of us, I'm sure there's enough pictures to last a lifetime so enjoy!

My visit to Kyoto!

So, last time I wrote about how much time I spent getting to kyoto and going from place to place around it.  Despite the difficulties, I still did get to see a lot of the things I wanted to.  I had to cut some cool things out of my list to see because they required reservations, but otherwise we got to see a great deal of what we wanted to.

The first day was nearly pointless.  We got to our first destination so late that it was closing time for that, so we had to move on.  It's unfortunate since we never did go to that place despite it being a big attraction.  Another day we tried to go back but it was closed that day and it was just our bad luck.  Anyway, we moved on to go near the imperial palace, however we couldn't really go inside it.  We just walked around the park that surrounded it.  Since we got a bit lost during our trip from the first destination to the imperial palace, we arrived a bit too late and most people were leaving or gone.  There wasn't too much to see but at least we did go near the palace.

After that day, we learned how to use the train system better and woke up earlier so that we could see more things in a day.  However we never did get to see a few things ( for example,
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3941.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3929.html http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3907.html for example  ) because of their location.  Kyoto was similar to Nara in that it had a lot of old shrines and temples to see, but it was different in that everything was spaced farther apart and trains did not always have stops near the things that we wanted to see.  So, of the things we missed, there not only were a few that had reservations we never made, but there were a few that had no train stop near them so it would have taken a long time just to walk from one to the next.

There's two good examples of how I wasn't able to see something due to its location.  The first is the day where we wanted to see three locations that were, relative to everything else, nearby each other.  On that day the closest train station to the first location resulted in a 40 minute walk from the station to the gold pavilion, and then from there we walked another 20 minutes or so to the rock garden, after which we were going to walk to the last place but didn't have the time and had to turn back.  And boy, all that walking was not very fun.  Especially not in that high humidity, high temperature weather.  I'm reminded of how I thought I wasn't going to spend a lot of money on food every day and that while I didn't, a lot of the money that I did spend each day was on things to drink to stay hydrated.

Anyway, there were about two other places that I wanted to go to, but instead of one long walk from place to place to place, there was simply no train anywhere nearby an isolated place and it would have taken a large part of the day just to travel to the one place and back.  One of such places was the silver pavilion.  Just look at this map, and see how much of a distance a train station was from the silver pavilion (ginkakuji) , compared to the gold pavilion (kinkakuji) which took over a half hour to walk to!  Of course, it wasn't really that travel would take up a whole day, but that most famous locations would close at 5PM so our "days" were shorter than I'd have liked.

We did still get to see some pretty nice places.  Heian Shrine was a nice, free trip.. although we must have made a common traveler's mistake since we tried to get there by walking down the main street from the station closest to it, and stopped at the first fancy, old looking building we came across only to find a sign that said this isn't the heian shrine.. we ended up at a martial arts school if I remember correctly.  Oops.

We also saw, but did not go near or in Kyoto tower.  It wasn't nearly as tall as the sky tree or as cool looking as the tokyo tower so we skipped it to save time for other things.  By the way, the gold pavilion and rock garden I mentioned earlier were very beautiful.  The gold pavilion was quite the sight to see, from the nice pond constructed around it to the gold-covered building itself.  Both it and the rock garden were very peaceful places to be.  Another beautiful place I saw was Byodoin temple.  Yet another temple, like the golden pavilion, that was surrounded by a sort of pond.  Very iconic perhaps, as it's the only building on the coins they have, being on the reverse side of the 10  yen coin.

Oh yes, and among other places there was also the world's longest wooden structure, Sanjusangendo.  I have no pictures of the inside since there were 1001 sacred statues that nobody could take photos of, but it was interesting to read about the significance of them, and it was quiet and peaceful despite the many people there.  I did manage to get a few pictures of the outside of it however, showing how long the building was.  Apparently it used to be used by archers to practice by shooting arrows from one end of the long building to a target on the other end.  Judging by how long the building was when I saw it, I thought that was pretty impressive.

I might still be leaving a few locations out, for example a famous temple I went to with my friends during a school trip, rather than on my own.  I'll be sure to add more if I did forget anything, but in the meanwhile I'll write about my trips up a mountain, and to an island, next post.

Kyoto : unfortunate transportation

After getting to Osaka and realizing there wasn't really much to do in the area that was worth the time, we took most of the remaining time to visit Kyoto.

Kyoto had a huge amount of famous places to visit, but I quickly found out that unfortunately I wasn't going to be able to visit everywhere that looked nice.  There just wasn't enough time to do everything.  The first problem was where we were staying in Osaka.  We were located in a place that wasn't convenient for people who want to travel to kyoto.  Even though kyoto is located nearby if you were to look at a map, there were many trains required to get from our hostel in osaka to the kyoto station, and that took a bit of time every day.

In order to get to kyoto we would have to take a train from one end of osaka to the other.  We were nowhere near the osaka station, which is the best way to get to kyoto.  The first set of trains we took to get to osaka station would take between a half hour to an hour since one connection came pretty infrequently.  Then, we would need to take another train for a half hour to get to kyoto station.  However, before we did that every day we would stop for lunch in the underground mall of osaka or somewhere nearby.

Once we did get to kyoto station, depending on where we wanted to go we sometimes had to take a local train to the station nearest to our destination.  However, the two problems with kyoto was that most things we wanted to see were between 10 minutes to 1 hour away from the nearest train station, and that most things were not located close to each other.  There was a bit of back and forth walking to get from a station to the destination and back before heading to the next place.

So, due to our location in osaka, trains, and walking time, it was hard to see as many things in kyoto as I would have liked.  It wasn't absurd so much as that I had an unusually quick and easy time getting from one place to another in the other cities that it was slow going in comparison. If I knew this ahead of time, I could have picked a different hostel to save some time.  But even then that wouldn't change how kyoto was laid out, and the only way I could have seen everything was if I had stayed in Japan longer.

On Osaka - not much

After Nara I made my way over to Osaka, which is the place that I planned to stay the longest after Tokyo.  The original plan was to stay in Osaka because of its close location to Nara and Kyoto, so that we could just take a train between the 3 places and only need one hostel.  However, the hostel in Nara looked so nice that I changed that plan and reduced the time that would be spent between Osaka and Kyoto so that we could stay in the Nara guesthouse.  That worked out really well, since I had exactly as much time as I needed to see Nara, had a great time there, and really enjoyed the place that I stayed at.  I can't say much of the same about the Osaka hostel however.

I was misinformed when I picked the hostel for Osaka so I ended up picking one with less than perfect ratings even though the reviews of the place didn't really say what was wrong with it.  When I got there I found out that there were a few things that made it inconvenient.  Unlike the old house in Nara I stayed at, this building was no antique and so I thought it might be more comfortable.  However, the stairs in this building were very steep and narrow which made it very hard to get luggage up.  David tried to get two suitcases up at once and was about to fall down the stairs because it just wasn't possible, but I was below so that didn't happen.  We got our suitcases up to our 3rd story room and checked out the place.

The whole time we had poor internet and owners who really never talked to us - they seemed unfriendly.  Unlike the other places we had been to before, we were the only white people in this hostel but it seemed that almost everyone else was korean, which is odd.  The first few nights there were difficult because the air conditioner in the room was turned on so low on purpose that I couldn't even feel it.  Someone must have said something since after that we had proper air conditioning for the rest of the stay and I could sleep without trouble.  There wasn't much else to say about the place.  Nothing special happened there.  Nobody talked to us and there was nothing interesting about the hostel.

About Osaka, we didn't spend much time around the area.  When I got there I came to the conclusion that going to Osaka was a lot less important than I thought.  It's the second biggest city in the country, but we had already been to Tokyo so it had nothing that we hadn't already seen.  Beyond that, we had been to one of the more populated parts of Osaka before since it wasn't that far from where we went to school for 6 weeks.  However that also meant that we knew where to shop and get food.

On shopping and food, we knew of a 10-floor electronics chain building that generally had one or three floors of the top dedicated to clothes and food.  But in this particular building, the basement floors connected to an underground shopping mall that seemed to go on forever.  One mall would connect to another underground and you could get lost in there.  With all of the multi floor super stores, sidestreets of strip malls that go on for a great distance, and huge underground malls in various places I had the thought that if I knew how many places to shop there really were in any area, I might find that the whole country is just a very large mall.

Anyway, we spent the first day or two in Osaka.  Finding out where we were staying and where there was to eat, as well as finding a movie theater so we could see batman, which we saw in english with japanese subtitles that we ignored.  And that was fun.  Speaking about movie theaters, I had seen two movies in total there but both times nobody left until after the credits.  I think that's just how it is done there.  Very patient anyway.

Instead of spending half of the time in Osaka and half in Kyoto like the plan was, we decided to spend most of the time in Kyoto since the list of things to see was long and it took a while to get there with all the connecting trains.  Next post is on Kyoto!

Back home!

I'm back in america now, safe and at home.  It was a long boring series of flights which involved a lot of sleeping, followed by a lot of staying awake since I was stuck at an airport overnight.  At least I found a place to use a power plug so I could use my computer all night while at atlanta.

Going though customs on the US side was as easy as it was on the Japan side.  Airport security is still more obnoxious here but at least customs was not trouble.

Brought back my whole new suitcase of things I bought, and even the old suitcase made it without falling apart!

I'm now going to have some work with adjusting my sleep schedule 11 hours.  But now I finally get to relax after 2 months of heavy studying and schoolwork followed by every day being busy with traveling.  New York is also pretty hot right now, but relative to japan it is cool so I am glad for that.

I still have more to write about my trip, as well as thoughts and interesting things I saw in japan!  My blog isn't done yet, but I wanted to let everyone know that I am home!


PS : I heard it's sort of hard to view my pictures online because there are so many and internet might be slow to get them one by one.  So, when I have all of them online I will package them into one single file that people can download.  It will still take a while but at least everyone will be able to do it at once overnight and then view each at your leisure.

Communication in japan part 2

                In the Tokyo hostel, we were one of the few who spoke Japanese although there were others so we were not that special.  Yet still, the people at the front desk were very friendly and one of the most cheerful girls had conversations with us in Japanese once or twice, like when she had recommended us a place to eat.

                At the nara guesthouse, when I arrived I spoke in Japanese to the best of my ability just as I have done everywhere else – even in situations where a Japanese person says something in English, perhaps assuming we don’t know Japanese, I will respond in Japanese unless the situation doesn’t call for it, just to be nice.  So in the guesthouse, I spoke in Japanese as we were taking care of the check-in procedure and the girl staff member was surprised and happy to find out that we knew Japanese and wanted to let all of the other staff know as well.  They were very happy, and wanted to hear about our backstory about how we were traveling after being international students.  From then on the staff tried to speak in Japanese to us but checked to make sure if we understood some of the more difficult words they used.  They kept saying how good we were at Japanese, even to some of the other people but I tried to be humble and say that I’m not quite good yet, still a beginner and still studying.

                An amazing thing happened the day after that, again in nara.  That day we were off to see the first of the shrines and temples I had planned to see in nara.  Plans changed that day after meeting a man in the local park.  We were walking buy when he said to himself “it’s hot out today isn’t it” in Japanese, and I had responded something like that yes, it was hot out today, but thankfully not as hot as it was in Tokyo where we just came from.  This basically shocked the man as he was like wait, you know Japanese?  He was extremely happy to meet visitors who knew Japanese and got up off the bench and wanted to talk with us while we walked.

  

He eventually decided to give us a tour of the area as we shared stories about our travels and heard about his stories.  He was a retired man, but took it upon himself to study English in his spare time.  He told us that he would watch tv and read in English for practice, and he was pretty good!  He said that he would take walks in the park once a week so we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  And just like that we made friends with a stranger in japan, and had conversations in Japanese for a few hours.  He eventually walked us to the local shopping mall and gave us free lunch!  Afterwards he had to go since it had been a few hours, but before he went I made sure that we all got a group photo!  I never did learn his name, but we talked about a whole bunch of stuff – even if some of the more in depth explanations of some content in the shrines and temples was impossible for us to understand.  It really made our day, and has been one of the highlights of our trip.  Just to meet and talk to random locals.  Befriend Japanese people, and exchange stories.  It was a really great thing to do and it made us feel really awesome for the day.

We had another awesome experience the next day when we traveled to the location of the original imperial palace.  There weren’t many people there for like I said I thought nara was a lot less populated than it should have been.  Only like 5 visitors in the building at a time, with maybe 5 or 10 volunteers or staffs and guards.  One of the volunteers/staff had come up to us and given us a pamphlet with information about the place in English.  I thanked him in Japanese and said that while I can understand a little Japanese, in a place like a museum it’s very useful for me to have an English explanation.  He must have been surprised that I knew Japanese at all since when he went back to his table he must have talked with the people nearby to tell them about how they had white visitors that spoke Japanese.

 I say that because then later we had a guard come up and start asking us questions in Japanese – the place was interested about us.  So we told him that we were previously students at konan university which he knew of, and then we told him about where we have been and where we are traveling to.  He thanked us for talking to him and then as we looked at some of the rest of the stuff in the palace we could hear him on the other end of the room telling the others about how we were students at konan university, and so on.  They all sounded very excited.  On our way out as we were about to walk off the grounds we saw the guard come out of some building with more papers and pamphlets in Japanese about the place.  He gave us these gifts and said maybe we could use them for studying Japanese.  So basically, we left a great impression on the people there that day for us to have been given gifts and be talked about just for talking Japanese.  And once again that made our day and made us feel awesome.

After these events we started thinking that we had too high expectations on how much Japanese visitors would know.  It was a very disappointing thing but also a very cool thing.  It seems that because almost no tourists know Japanese and all expect the Japanese to know English, that by comparison we had become the coolest people around just by having studied Japanese for only a year or two.  I told david that we have super powers now.  That we can brighten up the day of a Japanese person just by talking, since we are like the only white people around here that know any Japanese.  We often get complimented, and received gifts, a free tour and a free lunch.  Just by knowing a little bit of Japanese I think we are really getting more out of our vacation than a normal tourist would, just by the simple but powerful pleasure of being able to be friendly and talk to locals.

Unfortunately the people in Osaka didn’t seem to be as friendly.  Nothing bad has happened but the people of Osaka don’t seem to care as much or don’t want to talk as much as the people of nara.  But then again, Osaka is a big city and either we aren’t as unique there, or the people aren’t as friendly to tourists.  So, Osaka had little talking involved.

In my next set of posts I’ll talk about Osaka and Kyoto!  Although, I’m posting this from America already.  My trip ended!  But there’s still more to write.