Focus on the Locus
Setsubun, Fushimi Inari, Yoshida, Daitoku-ji
07/02/07 17:16
Last weekend marked a
week as a single guy, so I threw myself into socializing in order
to avoid the emptiness of my apartment. That Saturday was a
national holiday - Setsubun, the traditional beginning of the new
year - I succeeded to an exhausting level. Friday night I went out
for dinner with a colleague and got the lowdown on another shitty
relationship in my environs. I got home at 2:30 and crawled into
bed, sleeping a scant few hours before I woke to teach two private
classes. I mistook the starting time for the second class, and
without checking my pda, I dashed off through traffic to arrive on
time, nearly getting hit by a car I didn't see on the way.
That started a theme that has continued throughout this week - danger. Last night I was nearly pinched by a car that was backing into a parking spot because I thought it was pulling out instead of pulling in. This morning I was startled by a car pulling up to an intersection suddenly and I nearly fell into the river when I collided with another cyclist whom I was attempting to pass and who didn't see me. After that a pigeon made for my face in kamikaze style. I've decided to spend the rest of the week moving slowly.
Anyway, grateful that I was still alive, I took advantage of the good lighting and visited Fushimi-Inari Taisha, the shrine with a whole ton of red gates in order to take some pictures. It was interesting to return with a different camera. I shot better pictures by and large, but I felt a bit hindered by the length of the lens and really craved something wide to capture the scene better. Here are some photos from last year and this visit, check out the difference in the photos.
After that shrine I headed home for lunch and started watching Great Teacher Onizuka. This ridiculous anime is basically about an ex-gang leader and major slacker (yet somehow a third rate college graduate) who figures he'd like to be a teacher and make school fun again. Through some trials in actually getting a teaching position, he ends up at a school and is put in charge of a class that is legendary for its bad students. So far it is totally funny, but it does have a large does of horny adolescent humor involving highschool girl panties and other such sexual innuendo, so I don't think it is really for everyone.
I watched a few episodes and then headed off to meet Jenny and Stacy. We had a couple of drinks and then headed to Yoshida-jinga, one of the big shrines in Kyoto, because it was host to a large festival and bonfire. We ate and spilled a variety of food and then ended up standing around the fire until after 2am. I had a chance to talk to some more long term residents and become more confident that they are all varying shades of bonkers.
The next day, Jenny, Stacy and I met again to check out some temples. I shot a bunch of pictures, but I really only took one good photo, the one you are looking at right now. After that we went out for dinner (and a bottle of wine) and then hit a cafe for absinthe. I don't quite understand the mystique around this drink. The popculture understanding of it is that it is hallucinogenic. I am not sure about my experience. We had one, but it wasn't lit on fire or mixed with sugar (which you are supposed to do?) and it tasted like sambuca mixed with toothpaste. Stacy said that her only reaction in the past was brighter vision. Since she told me that, I am treating the following experience with a bit of skepticism. The next bar we visited (in order to drink sangria) was a Spanish joint with walls painted in red and blue stripes. Either those colours shouldn't be put together or the absinthe was doing something, because the border between them was hurting my eyes.
So that was Sunday. Monday was another private class, Aeon, and then an evening out for coffee with a really sweet student. A relatively early night, home at 11:30. Check out the photo galleries for images of what I am talking about.
Edit: I just found out that my camera raw isn't supported by my version of Photoshop, so the galleries will have to wait a little. Go bittorrent go!
That started a theme that has continued throughout this week - danger. Last night I was nearly pinched by a car that was backing into a parking spot because I thought it was pulling out instead of pulling in. This morning I was startled by a car pulling up to an intersection suddenly and I nearly fell into the river when I collided with another cyclist whom I was attempting to pass and who didn't see me. After that a pigeon made for my face in kamikaze style. I've decided to spend the rest of the week moving slowly.
Anyway, grateful that I was still alive, I took advantage of the good lighting and visited Fushimi-Inari Taisha, the shrine with a whole ton of red gates in order to take some pictures. It was interesting to return with a different camera. I shot better pictures by and large, but I felt a bit hindered by the length of the lens and really craved something wide to capture the scene better. Here are some photos from last year and this visit, check out the difference in the photos.
After that shrine I headed home for lunch and started watching Great Teacher Onizuka. This ridiculous anime is basically about an ex-gang leader and major slacker (yet somehow a third rate college graduate) who figures he'd like to be a teacher and make school fun again. Through some trials in actually getting a teaching position, he ends up at a school and is put in charge of a class that is legendary for its bad students. So far it is totally funny, but it does have a large does of horny adolescent humor involving highschool girl panties and other such sexual innuendo, so I don't think it is really for everyone.
I watched a few episodes and then headed off to meet Jenny and Stacy. We had a couple of drinks and then headed to Yoshida-jinga, one of the big shrines in Kyoto, because it was host to a large festival and bonfire. We ate and spilled a variety of food and then ended up standing around the fire until after 2am. I had a chance to talk to some more long term residents and become more confident that they are all varying shades of bonkers.
The next day, Jenny, Stacy and I met again to check out some temples. I shot a bunch of pictures, but I really only took one good photo, the one you are looking at right now. After that we went out for dinner (and a bottle of wine) and then hit a cafe for absinthe. I don't quite understand the mystique around this drink. The popculture understanding of it is that it is hallucinogenic. I am not sure about my experience. We had one, but it wasn't lit on fire or mixed with sugar (which you are supposed to do?) and it tasted like sambuca mixed with toothpaste. Stacy said that her only reaction in the past was brighter vision. Since she told me that, I am treating the following experience with a bit of skepticism. The next bar we visited (in order to drink sangria) was a Spanish joint with walls painted in red and blue stripes. Either those colours shouldn't be put together or the absinthe was doing something, because the border between them was hurting my eyes.
So that was Sunday. Monday was another private class, Aeon, and then an evening out for coffee with a really sweet student. A relatively early night, home at 11:30. Check out the photo galleries for images of what I am talking about.
Edit: I just found out that my camera raw isn't supported by my version of Photoshop, so the galleries will have to wait a little. Go bittorrent go!
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An Appendix to Lonely Planet's "Hiking in Japan" Odai-ga-hara to Osugi
28/10/06 15:06
This is
a short entry: despite the availability of buses, of hordes of
tourists, and current maps that give the appearance of everything
being a-okay, the trail down into the Otsugi Valley was destroyed
by a Typhoon in 2004. I met a large group of hikers who warned me
off the non-existent trail with a profusion of "impossible,
impossible" and also pointed out that the hut that I was aiming at
had the characters for "temporarily closed" written over it. The
guy leading the group of hikers apparently owned that hut, and we
were all rather confused as to why my 2006 map would list the hut
as closed (due to the typhoon) but still had a trail drawn in, when
it fact it had been destroyed.
Anyway, that trail has been trashed - I returned home defeated.
For those of you still interested in exploring other trails in the area, it is still possible to go as far as Awadani hut on the original trail. The hikers I met were doing a loop track that went from Awadani hut up to Nishidani-daka, so that could be a possibility, even though it isn't posted on the LP or Shobunsha maps.
Anyway, that trail has been trashed - I returned home defeated.
For those of you still interested in exploring other trails in the area, it is still possible to go as far as Awadani hut on the original trail. The hikers I met were doing a loop track that went from Awadani hut up to Nishidani-daka, so that could be a possibility, even though it isn't posted on the LP or Shobunsha maps.
An Appendix to Lonely Planet's "Hiking in Japan" Daisetsuzan Grand Traverse
16/09/06 12:41
Notes from my recent Daisetsuzan hike for
those interested in doing the same. I sent these to the main Lonely
Planet writer in Japan, Chris
Rowthorn.
Read More...
One More Reason to Never Pick Up a Gun - What goes by undetected in the phrase - no casualties.
16/09/06 11:51
Read a
news reel: 53 dead, 92 injured. After you read about the dead, the
injured seem to be in such a better place. It is true, being
injured is better than being dead, but for me, for the official
counts in the news and the internet, the injured matter so much
less as to be like apples and oranges.
The problem for me lies in the variety: what can injured mean? A bomb goes off - one guy gets nicked on the thigh by some flying glass. Is that an injury? It has to be treated. Do they count those? Raise the severity - someone else gets a shard of glass driven though his leg, requiring surgery to save it and giving him a permanent limp. This must be an injury. And again - another person nearest the assailant loses a leg, an arm and an eye and suffers burns that disfigure him. The last two suffer from injuries that affect them for the rest of their lives. Yet when we hear the often unelaborated word "injured", it passes by under a cloud of "at least they aren't dead". The lack of elaboration is likely often due to the military. They have to release that soldiers were killed, but they don't have to say that soldiers were horribly disfigured and are being shipped back to the US for their families to deal with.
And then there is this. Due to advances in body armor, soldiers are surviving blasts that still turn their brains to tapioca. They experience slow physical reactions, memory loss, violent mood swings, and depression. This is being called the signature wound of the Iraq war, due to the number of roadside explosives.
So we have among the hazy injured: the limping, the burnt or scarred, the mutilated, the blinded (deafened etc) AND the mentally retarded. While shell shock in previous wars was a result of extreme anxiety, this is actually physical brain damage, and largely untreatable with psychology.
Even worse, there are soldiers who haven't reported being injured, but whose brains have been seriously damaged. Want to see a time-bomb? Send a 20 year old decked in honors back to a family he doesn't remember.
The problem for me lies in the variety: what can injured mean? A bomb goes off - one guy gets nicked on the thigh by some flying glass. Is that an injury? It has to be treated. Do they count those? Raise the severity - someone else gets a shard of glass driven though his leg, requiring surgery to save it and giving him a permanent limp. This must be an injury. And again - another person nearest the assailant loses a leg, an arm and an eye and suffers burns that disfigure him. The last two suffer from injuries that affect them for the rest of their lives. Yet when we hear the often unelaborated word "injured", it passes by under a cloud of "at least they aren't dead". The lack of elaboration is likely often due to the military. They have to release that soldiers were killed, but they don't have to say that soldiers were horribly disfigured and are being shipped back to the US for their families to deal with.
And then there is this. Due to advances in body armor, soldiers are surviving blasts that still turn their brains to tapioca. They experience slow physical reactions, memory loss, violent mood swings, and depression. This is being called the signature wound of the Iraq war, due to the number of roadside explosives.
So we have among the hazy injured: the limping, the burnt or scarred, the mutilated, the blinded (deafened etc) AND the mentally retarded. While shell shock in previous wars was a result of extreme anxiety, this is actually physical brain damage, and largely untreatable with psychology.
Even worse, there are soldiers who haven't reported being injured, but whose brains have been seriously damaged. Want to see a time-bomb? Send a 20 year old decked in honors back to a family he doesn't remember.
Hokkaido Photo Trip
10/09/06 23:38
Bon Bon Cafe
01/09/06 11:35
I'd like
to say I found this cafe, but I tend to stay away from French food
in Japan. Japan's idea of French food is French Fries but this is
my own Canadian cultural bias: we have immigrants who can share the
real thing. Japanese cooks have to make a guess and cater to the
Japanese palate.
In any case, I ''found'' this cafe through a coworker, who likely ''found'' it through the Lonely Planet guide for Kyoto. That she ran into the main writer for LP in Japan there makes it possible. The food is great and cheap! Lunch is from 300 to 700 yen, offering sandwiches and salads. You can eat inside in the AC or sit outside on a covered patio -- a rarity in Japan -- and look out over the river and up at the big Kanji that has been cut into the mountain side for several hundred years. Dinners are either 2000 for an entree or 1000 yen for a dish, and drinks are about 600 yen, with wine by the bottle available. Dessert runs about 500yen.
My only dislike about the place is that the menus have French dish names and Japanese explanations of the ingredients. While it was nice to be able to partially read a menu in Japan, the script describing the ingredients in Japanse was scribbly and hard to make out, so I had to guess that I knew what was in it by the French title. The waiter I spoke to did speak a bit of English, however.
Lunch is paid up front, dinner is paid at the end. Overall, a charming cafe, a fair attempt at French cuisine, and a fantastic location. Take the Keihan line to the terminus at Demachiyanagi, take exit 3, and cross the bridge. It is on the water.
In any case, I ''found'' this cafe through a coworker, who likely ''found'' it through the Lonely Planet guide for Kyoto. That she ran into the main writer for LP in Japan there makes it possible. The food is great and cheap! Lunch is from 300 to 700 yen, offering sandwiches and salads. You can eat inside in the AC or sit outside on a covered patio -- a rarity in Japan -- and look out over the river and up at the big Kanji that has been cut into the mountain side for several hundred years. Dinners are either 2000 for an entree or 1000 yen for a dish, and drinks are about 600 yen, with wine by the bottle available. Dessert runs about 500yen.
My only dislike about the place is that the menus have French dish names and Japanese explanations of the ingredients. While it was nice to be able to partially read a menu in Japan, the script describing the ingredients in Japanse was scribbly and hard to make out, so I had to guess that I knew what was in it by the French title. The waiter I spoke to did speak a bit of English, however.
Lunch is paid up front, dinner is paid at the end. Overall, a charming cafe, a fair attempt at French cuisine, and a fantastic location. Take the Keihan line to the terminus at Demachiyanagi, take exit 3, and cross the bridge. It is on the water.