This thing is in my living room now. He showed up today. Looks like we'll be keeping him.
Otherwise we know very little about him.
Haven't decided on a name yet. It'll be something cute, probably.
A major event in Fukuoka history has been sadly, slowly and extremely quietly unfolding on the western fringes of the city. It is a sad little story that doesn't seem to have entered the English speaking part of the internet yet, so I thought I'd let this blog post fill in the gap. My homage to the short and tragic life of Sky Dream Fukuoka.
They could be seen from miles away and, lit up at night, dominated the city's western skyline. As the Japanese Wikipedia entry notes, this unusual sight became one of the city's more prominent landmarks and they became known as Fukuoka's "twin Ferris wheels."
This is a picture I took yesterday from roughly the same spot:
The thing sat silently for at least a year after its closure, but last summer work commenced on dismantling it and by now it looks close to half finished. It has been sold to a Taiwanese investor and, once they have re-constructed it there, that country will have a Ferris wheel larger than any in all of Japan (and the 9th largest in the world).
Its kind of a sad story. This thing was only 8 years old when it closed - that is barely more than half the life expectancy of a chihuahua. Its entire existence from birth to death fit neatly within the confines of the fledgling 21st century, which must be a first for a structure of this magnitude.
Workers were busy at work taking the thing down piece by piece as we visited. It is a massive operation, it looks just as difficult as it must have been to build it in the first place.
Ena and I had ice cream under the little one (literally):
We had to wonder if this one's days aren't numbered also. In the 15 minutes we were there not a single customer appeared. One by one the lonely little gondolas arced skyward, empty. It was a Monday though and the mall wasn't too busy, perhaps on the weekend it'll get more business. We thought of going up, but it seemed like it would have been a sorry substitute for the big one we sorely wished we had ridden when we had the chance. And the 500 yen price for what looked like a 3 minute or so ride seemed a bit steep.
Like Trotsky, it was never there. Just a figment of our imaginations.
The Japanese baseball season started a couple of weeks late this year due to the tsunami. The Rakuten Eagles play in Sendai and their stadium was severely damaged so they've had to juggle the schedules around quite a bit to enable Rakuten to play on the road while repairs are made.
Due to my general fear of change I view this as a good thing.
Well, the bags and cards look the same, but when I first started collecting these things they only put one card in the bag. They started putting 2 in a couple years ago. This development didn't help me get any closer to collecting a whole set. In fact, it just made me buy less of them as they jacked the price per bag all the way up to 88 yen.
That is it. You would need to eat several hundred bags of plain chips over the course of a single baseball season to have a realistic shot at collecting the whole set. Hence my failure to ever come close to accomplishing that goal. They are fine every once in a while but its still April and I'm tired of the things already. Sour cream and onion would be nice every once in a while.
On the afternoon of our last day in Kyoto we headed over to the Philosopher's Path ("Tetsugaku no Michi") which leads to the Nanzenji temple. This is literally just a cherry tree-lined path that winds its way along a canal (more of a ditch) for a couple kilometres.
We had some "sakura" ice cream sold from a vendor with an ice chest strapped to the back of her bicycle, which I thought was a pretty cool way to run a business:
All in all it was a pleasant walk. If you are in the area, a walk down the Philosopher's path is a great way of getting from Ginkakuji to the vicinity of Nanzenji. If you aren't in the area, I wouldn't really recommend going out of your way to see it though!
Ena and I had a seat on the ledge of this gateway and realized that inevitably any trip we ever take to Kyoto at some point involves us sitting on the gateway to Nanzenji, looking at the maple trees. Its a long tradition dating back to my parent's first visit to Japan way back when and continuing up to the present. Its just a nice place to sit. If memory serves the film "Lost in Translation" even has one of those moody, reflective scenes with Scarlett Johansson at the gate to Nanzenji. But we were there first. She is such a poser, that Scarlett Johansson. I don't remember if she was sitting down in that scene or not.
This time, for the first time, we decided to actually enter the paid-entry part of the temple. There are actually 3 different areas that you have to pay 3 different entrance fees for, so we only opted for the most expensive one - the Hojo garden.
I have to say that it was a bit of a letdown though. The free parts of the Nanzenji temple are so impressive that I was probably expecting the paid parts to totally blow me away, which they inevitably failed to do. They were nice though.
Visiting the Nanzenji was a bit of a bitter-sweet experience though, as we knew it was the last place we had time to visit and would have to bring our fun-filled trip to an end. I have to say that this was probably the best trip we've ever had. It was one of those trips where even when stuff didn't work out (like our arriving too late to see Hiei zan) we just laughed it off. Nothing could spoil the enjoyment we were having. We were lucky with the weather too as it didn't rain at all, which helped a lot!
So we headed off back through the gates of the Nanzenji, sad in the knowledge that our trip was at an end, but happy in the knowledge that we had been able to have such a nice time in our four days and once again promising each other that we'd visit again someday.
On 3 of the 4 days we spent in Kyoto, we got around on rental bicycles. For those of you planning a trip to Kyoto, bicycles are a great way to see the city. It is flat, compact and has plenty of cycling paths (like the one on the Kamogawa) and wide sidewalks (on which you can ride bikes in Japan), so it is quite safe and pleasant if the weather holds out.
The staff are quite friendly. They provide a very useful 24 page Kyoto cycling map with each rental. The map is in Japanese, though the main page has the bigger sites written in English as well.
Our last day in Kyoto was sunny and warm. We had until 8PM until our bus would whisk us back to Fukuoka, so once again we set out to explore some of the remaining sites we had not yet hit on rented bicycles.
There is a little villa in a garden you can see, it used to be the residence of a retainer back in the old days:
After that we pedaled over to Higashiyama, stopping at the Eikando. The Eikando is a decent temple with a very lovely little garden tucked in a courtyard that looks different from different sides. If you are a garden lover I recommend coming to Kyoto a couple weeks later than we did, these places must look amazing with all the leaves open:
They've decorated the temple buildings with these colorful curtains which just scream "Eikando":
You can climb up the hill to a little pagoda halfway up. Its got a nice view of the city from up there. It looks better photographed from a distance though:
Our Kyoto trip continues in the next post!
On our third night we walked over from the hotel to Yasaka Jinja in the Gion area. Its an interesting place at night, overlooking the bustle of Gion:
The gate is bright orange and white:
Large stones make for an attractive path to the centre of the Shrine. The lanterns bring it to life after dark::
Nearby in Maruyama Koen the spring splendor of the giant weeping cherry tree is fully lit:
On the street in front of the shrine we spot a Maiko san heading off to an evening appointment and looking somewhat out of place in the modern surroundings:
Around the corner though is the Gion district's main entertainment district for the well to do, a fitting destination for her:
After watching her duck discreetly into a doorway, we headed back to our hotel and called it a night.
Continued in the next post.
The Kamogawa is a nice river that runs north-south through central Kyoto. Along the banks the city has created an excellent cycling/pedestrian path that provides a great, tree-lined way of traversing the city by bicycle.
This is the Pontocho area, an alley running next to the river which houses many of the most exclusive entertainment establishments in town. At night they light up and you can see the goings on within from a bridge crossing the river:
These places are way more than our budget would allow for, so we didn't venture in. If you venture a further block away from the river though you'll find one of the better cherry blossom viewing places in Kyoto along a small canal that runs parallel to Pontocho:
Some of the shops are interesting, like this one with a giant lantern (called "red mustache", note the illustration on the top):
There are some quirky shops and restaurants along this street which are much less upscale than the ones on neighboring Pontocho.
For reasons which are not entirely clear to me, a lot of Kyoto's pornography stores also line this street, a fact that we found amusing as the tourist brochures carefully crop them out of the photos.
Its got a bit of class to it, though unless you are planning on seeing a Kabuki play I wouldn't recommend tracking it down just for the sake of seeing the building.
Today marks exactly one month since the Tohoku earthquake devastated northeastern Japan. One of the side effects of the tsunami that has affected the country as a whole has been its effects on the tourism industry. The Japan Times reported last week that the number of foreign visitors to Japan arriving via Narita airport, Japan's largest, was down 75% in the period from the earthquake through to the end of March. Another article further suggests that domestic tourism is down as well.
After the quake struck, we weren't sure if we should still go on the trip. Kyoto is closer to, but still quite far from, the disaster area. More than that though, it just seemed unfair for us to be doing something enjoyable at a time when so many people are undergoing so much misery.
Two of Kyoto's more contemporary sites of interest exist side by side in the centre of town: Kyoto Station and Kyoto Tower.
It has all sorts of useless "stuff" cluttering up the view, which actually makes the gray-ness much more palatable :
The most interesting feature of Kyoto Station is the massive set of escalators. They take you from street level all the way to the top of the building in one long, continuous route. After the second floor, they are almost completely empty. Its a unique experience to ride them though, especially at night. I took a video of the whole journey from top to bottom here, with musical accompaniment and everything!
This provides for a brief detour into one of the more unusual and little-known side effects of the plethora of escalators which Kyoto Station is endowed with: creepy old men using hidden cameras to take up-skirt videos of women on said escalators.
I have to say that I really dislike Kyoto Tower. I've never been up it, but I've been in the building a couple times. The reason I've never gone to the top is that it costs 700 yen to do so. To put that in perspective, we visited more than half a dozen top class UNESCO world heritage sights in the city during our trip and not a single one charged that much for admission. And this is just to ride a frigging elevator! Also it needs to be pointed out that the observation deck at Kyoto Station across the street is completely free and provides almost as good a view (though its a bit shorter).
Anyway, as I've said I've been in the building a couple times. The first few floors are souvenir shops and there is a book store as well. The souvenir shop on the ground floor looks like something out of the 60s (which it is):
I really hate the souvenir shops at Kyoto Tower though and recommend avoiding the place entirely. The sales staff are some of the pushiest I have ever experienced in Japan and their entire stock is just the regular crap you can buy anywhere.
