Jan 18, 2008
My first day in Kyto. Irene kindly procured a bike for me and that was great as Kyoto is a great city to see on bike.
Hungry, I wake up and we bike to a teishoku: a set lunch place. You select and pay at a venting machine and it gives you a ticket and sit down. Somehow, we had problems with this clever form of commerce.
After lunch, we biked all over: Yoskida and Heian shrines with their orange torri; a tea house for some Matcha [mmmm...]; Kyodo university to buy some pens in their bookstore. I go crazy for office supplies in general and the Japanese have such a nuanced understanding of stationary that i just couldn't help myself.
As I would come to learn more fully later, Kyoto is a popular travel destination for Japanese tourists. So there are toursit and shopping districts, but they are geared largely for Japanese, which is kinda cool to see. In my mind, the best way to experience a place is to live there, barring that, to know someone who lives there. I hate feeling like a tourist. But if i have to be one, it is nice to know other, more native people are also toursits. At any rate, we went to 'Teramachi dori', a covered shopping place. We ate eel. And I learned about this magic, electric spice called 'sansho', which is like a peppery lemon grass that makes your mouth kinda numb and happy. We had fun.
Then the night began.
We met Irene's fellow Japanes-learing-undergrad-exchange students at an 'all you can drink in two hours' bar called 'Den-en'. A lot happened here. They played 'never have i ever'. Being much more sinful and much older than anyone else at the table, I found it challenging to think of things I haven't done. The night goes on. We are a group of increasingly loud white folks at a table next to a table of increasingly jolly Japanese undergrads and at some piont, the perfect amount of alcohol had been consumed and emissaries from from each table were sent, chitchat ensued. They were celebrating exams being over. We were just drinking our faces off. They loved speaking English. We loved speaking Japanese [wa yo].
I go to the men's room to see some sketchy, Burroughs-esqe sence beign played out. Two guys sitting on the floor crying, a third angrily standing over them. I pee. And leave, asking 'um.. you guys ok?' in English.
Soon, our two hours of all you can drink are over and we leave. On the street outside, we are called 'gaijin-san' by some unassuming Japanese kids. We are American, and assholes, so we go to 'billy's bar'.
'Billy' is this enthusiastic, if a bit overly entrepreneurial husky Japanese guy who caters to foreign students. Tonight is karaoke night. I get the feeling any night can be Karaoke night.
The night ends with a 4am bike ride home. the long way. It was amazing. A guy pees on the highway. We stop at a 7-11 and get some shochu and ice cream.
