Wisely Choice: if it is you when it is necessary to choose either, it does very

This past week I went with a friend to Kyoto. On Monday I hopped on the shinkansen, aka the bullet train (a different one than Steph and her friend Kim took, how was I supposed to know that there was one at 4:00 and another one going to the same place leaving at 4:03?) for a 2.5 hour ride and watched as Tokyo blurred by. We got up to about 250km/h (155mph) and the ride was incredibly smooth. The weather was hot and humid the whole time we were there and it rained twice, but we were in good positions to sit out the storms both times.

Kyoto is known for its many many temples. They are everywhere. After awhile on temple looks the same as any other. Some you had to pay to see, some were free. Some had big expansive gardens, others just lots of gravel.

One of the first we went to see was quite the tourist trap. Had to pay 500¥ to get in, then find out that the temple is off limits and completely covered due to refurbishment. The grounds were beautiful though and the surrounding hills were covered in moss. One strange thing was that you could not see a single fallen leaf anywhere in the forest. As we were walking around we found out why. Old men were sweeping the entire thing.

Some temples had angry dogs.


Tuesday and Wednesday were temple seeing days and we did a short visit to the lackluster Kyoto National Museum. I shouldn't badmouth the museum though, they did have big comfy leather chairs that caused gimplexus.

We did walk down some random streets and were lucky enough to see a geisha in a deserted area so I was able to get a picture without hundreds of other people crowding around her. There is a certain area of town where the geisha still work and we were fortunate to see some actually working on a riverside deck.



Wednesday night we all just crashed in the hotel to rest up when I decided to turn on the TV. I never watch Japanese TV except for some soccer games once in awhile. I may have watched a total of 3 hours of pure Japanese TV before that night. The show that caught my eye was a compitition between a group of Americans and Japanese to see who could build the best tree house. This brought me back to memory lane and going with the family to some shop (a tree house store??) that had books on building treehouses. I remember looking at these books and always hoping on getting that three story victorian.

I also remembered that a friend (Bubba) of a friend (John P) was a treehouse builder in the US, I thought he would get a kick out of the show. Anyway, I continued to watch and who did I see working with Team USA? Bubba! The show must have liked him because they kept saying his name, which is the only thing I could understand.

The Americans built a 2 story with bridges leading to other trees while the Japanese just built some dodecahedron (12 sided die) thing for people to sit in. Team USA won 23-8 in a vote.

Thursday saw us heading out to a monkey sancuary to, well, look at monkeys.

This one didn't like be so much. It is blurred because I was jumping back while taking the picture.




Below are videos, one of the glories of Japanese toilets and the other is of monkeys. I posted more pictures on my flickr account which you can go to by clicking on "pictures" on the right hand side.