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One day forward, eight hours back.
May. 10th, 2006 09:52 pmThis keyboard is wrestling me for control; the button that turns on the katakana is very easy to hit in place of the space bar. Also, I cannot find the apostrophe, so I suppose that I will have to avoid contractions or possessives.
I have been in Kyoto, which for years has been at the top of my list of places to visit that I never yet had, for two full days now. I want to talk about that, but it is difficult to figure out how. There is so much that is just experience; I cannot break it down into words yet. It is, as prophesized, very likely the most beautiful place I have ever been.
Our temple schedule has been very intense. We visited something like six yesterday, and passed countless more as we walked between them. By the end of the day, our eyes were glazed and our legs sore (I personally was also dehydrated). Today we did less, and did more bussing than walking, but my legs were already primed to soreness. I did see the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, which surprised me by being beautiful, not in an abstract or intellectual way but in a very accessibly visceral one. It really does look like islands.
There are a lot of Japan-things, most of which are what you would expect. They have a mascot for everything, down to the garbage cans, which display proudly on the sides a pair of egg people whose greatest joy is apparently to sweep up litter. Schoolchildren, especially girls, wave and shout, Harro! and, See you! (I cannot find the quotation marks, either.) The vast majority of written or spoken warnings and advisories I cannot understand. English shows up in strange and whimsical ways, often grammatical, or almost so, but clearly constructed from the outside. When I hear it, I fall naturally back into my pattern of unconscious comprehension, before recalling with a shock that it is not normal here.
Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner at a restaurant with a vast menu full of tiny pictures that we could not really interpret. (Everyone but me was also going out drinking, but, surprisingly, I did not mind this. I have discovered that if I like someone, there is a good chance that I will enjoy their company even drunk. They get clumsier and inappropriately loud, and laugh at stupid things, and repeat their jokes in case you did not hear, so it is kind of like they all turn into me.) Some of our number had rudimentary or even complex Japanese, but this did not much help; we got into a series of strange and remarkable misunderstandings, which included accidentally ordering three dishes and spending about five minutes cycling through the same dialogue as we tried to indicate that crab was okay. They kept trading out for serving staff who were slightly better adept at English (after the first lady, who tried, just like anyone else dealing with a foreigner, shouting slowly at us in her native tongue); finally we ended up with a guy who asked where we were from.
Vancouver? He had been there. I like (he said) winter sports, and then he turned and did this strange illustrative bum-wiggle, and left. This, for me, was the last straw, and I laughed confused and helplessly for a very long time.
There were more misadventures, before the meal was over, but now I need to get off because a lot of people are waiting, and I have been on way too long. I will try to write more later.
I have been in Kyoto, which for years has been at the top of my list of places to visit that I never yet had, for two full days now. I want to talk about that, but it is difficult to figure out how. There is so much that is just experience; I cannot break it down into words yet. It is, as prophesized, very likely the most beautiful place I have ever been.
Our temple schedule has been very intense. We visited something like six yesterday, and passed countless more as we walked between them. By the end of the day, our eyes were glazed and our legs sore (I personally was also dehydrated). Today we did less, and did more bussing than walking, but my legs were already primed to soreness. I did see the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, which surprised me by being beautiful, not in an abstract or intellectual way but in a very accessibly visceral one. It really does look like islands.
There are a lot of Japan-things, most of which are what you would expect. They have a mascot for everything, down to the garbage cans, which display proudly on the sides a pair of egg people whose greatest joy is apparently to sweep up litter. Schoolchildren, especially girls, wave and shout, Harro! and, See you! (I cannot find the quotation marks, either.) The vast majority of written or spoken warnings and advisories I cannot understand. English shows up in strange and whimsical ways, often grammatical, or almost so, but clearly constructed from the outside. When I hear it, I fall naturally back into my pattern of unconscious comprehension, before recalling with a shock that it is not normal here.
Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner at a restaurant with a vast menu full of tiny pictures that we could not really interpret. (Everyone but me was also going out drinking, but, surprisingly, I did not mind this. I have discovered that if I like someone, there is a good chance that I will enjoy their company even drunk. They get clumsier and inappropriately loud, and laugh at stupid things, and repeat their jokes in case you did not hear, so it is kind of like they all turn into me.) Some of our number had rudimentary or even complex Japanese, but this did not much help; we got into a series of strange and remarkable misunderstandings, which included accidentally ordering three dishes and spending about five minutes cycling through the same dialogue as we tried to indicate that crab was okay. They kept trading out for serving staff who were slightly better adept at English (after the first lady, who tried, just like anyone else dealing with a foreigner, shouting slowly at us in her native tongue); finally we ended up with a guy who asked where we were from.
Vancouver? He had been there. I like (he said) winter sports, and then he turned and did this strange illustrative bum-wiggle, and left. This, for me, was the last straw, and I laughed confused and helplessly for a very long time.
There were more misadventures, before the meal was over, but now I need to get off because a lot of people are waiting, and I have been on way too long. I will try to write more later.
