19th December
Kyoto
For breakfast, we ended up eating more machine food, which was the cheapest and most convienient form of food there or something. My dad had this reslly weird beans thing which was really sticky and tasted horrid, with a little aftertaste like that of coffee. Weirdness.
My mother had been obsessing over this shrine from the previous night before, as in her colleagues and sister had told her about it and she wanted to go there, only problem: she didn't know the name in Japanese. In the end she managed to sucessfully piss both my father and I off with her constant rubbish about a "Clear Water Shrine (direct translation)" or "Qing Shui Jie (reading the kanji name as Chinese, both from her sister)". In the end her sister gave her directions and we ended up going back to the Kyoto Station where my mother kept repeating the above two names to the very confused non-English speaking information counter people. In the end I went to search my guide book and came up with "mizu" as water, but still the people didn't understand. In the end my dad got fed up and wrote it in Chinese and the people instantly knew what the hell my mother wanted, Kiyomizu Shrine.
So we hopped on a bus there and went to visit it. My dad was a little fed up and kept saying he'd been cheated because we didn't actually see any 'clear water' there. Instead we made jokes about the only clear water we saw there being yellow coloured and found in the toilet. However it was much later till we were actually leaving the shrine that we saw the 'clear water' part, where you're supposed to drink water from this stream or something, so all of us gave it a try.
We wandered about the area, looking at more shrines and gardens around the area, which was a little South from where we were the previous day. At this park I saw two Japanese girls taking pictures of this magnificently huge puff ball of dog. The owner was nearby and he gestured that he allowed me to pet it and take a picture with it. Lol. I also saw these few guys feeding pigeons with them landing on their arms and whatnot, taking pictures. The guys offered some extra feed to me but I declined because pigeons are dirty, filthy birds. Lunch was more machine food and I had this Japanese beef curry with rice. After lunch we decided to take another cab to the shrine that we missed yesterday which was really big and we visted a zen garden inside.
Then we walked to the subway to take a train to this shopping attractions, which was something like a market which sold a lot of food, even fugu (puffer fish), but we didn't try it. We bought more junk food there and I ate some weird fried tofu balls. As we walked, we discovered that the 'street' we were walking down actually connected to the shopping area we were in last night. Lol. Anyway in this shop which sold some second hand stuff, my dad found me this really cool and nice looking pseudo trenchcoat in black which cost 1990 Yen ($26.67) which was second hand. It fit really well and he bought it for my since my old jacket was spoiled.
Then we went to look for a toilet (LOL) and we ended up at this department store like place. The ladies had only 2 toilet stalls and moments before us, this lady rushed in. My mum went to use the other cubicle so I waited outside. What was most curious about it was this I kept hearing this weird as shit sound coming from the other ladies' cubicle. It sounded like a handphone ringtone, beaten up and strangled. The sound carried on for a long time, making me very puzzled. Then this other middle aged woman came in with her daugther, who looked a little older than me. I could tell the older woman really 'needed to go', so when my mum finished I let her go first. That made me the next candidate for lady weird sounds' cubicle. When lady weird sound came out, I entered the cubicle and as the smell hit my nose, I knew why she took so long. The next mystery was the weird sound. I looked around the cubicle and found this weird machine, then I remembered that I had heard all about those machines which mask the 'unsightly' sound one makes when releasing metabolic waste. I would have pressed it, but the other girl and her mother were still in the toilet.
I can't really remember what we ate for dinner. After that we headed for the hotel and I watched some retarded Japanese show, like those talk shows. This one featured these two guys, the hosts I think, trying out synchronised swimming with a bunch of grade school kids.
20th December
Kyoto-Ise-Kashikojima-Ise
In the morning we headed straight for the Kyoto train station because we didn't know what time the trains would depart. Ise-shii is a small fishing town on the Eastern coast of Southern Honshu. In other words it's like Osaka being Harbourfront, Kyoto being Orchad Road, Nara being The CBD and Ise being Changi (and I mean all of this in relative distance). Have fun visualising that. In other words, it was far away from the more populated areas of the Kinki Plain and few people went there so there'd be quite few trains there. When we bought the tickets, we found out that the next train was a mere 5 minutes away, so we ended up rushing there and skipping breakfast. Instead we ate junk food for breakfast.
The ride was about 2 hours long on the Kintetsu Ltd. Express Line, which was the fastest train there. When we got off at the station, we spent some time further confusing the station master with our questions on trains to Kashikojima/Toba, which was right at the tip of the mini peninsular, then we set off for our ryokan, Hoshideken, which turned out to be this really rustic 200 year old Inn. It was really cool inside, in more ways than one. There was even this little garden in the middle of the ryokan. The baths turned out to be those traditional ones too, argh so cold.
We were really hungry by that time and walked into the first eating place we saw, which turned out to be this Italian restaurant. There were no pictures or anything so we just pointed at stuff and made our order, hoping for the best. The waitress spoke a little English too. It turned out in the entire nicely done up restaurant, there were only 2 staff: her and the chef. Sometimes the chef had to go out of the kitchen to deliver the food himself. The place was really popular too and was packed and the waitress was really busy. The food we ordered turned out to be some mushroom stew over rice, clam spaghetti and this seafood cheese pasta. I ended up having the latter because my mum didn't want the cheese sauce. It was really really salty, too much cheese or something :/
We caught the train to Kashikojima which turned out to be the local train and stopped at every station along the way, it took about 30 mins to get to Kashikojima, the last stop on the line. At Kashikojima, we bought tickets for this boat ride which would bring us around the coast and the smaller islands. The main selling point of Kashikojima and Toba was that they were the areas where pearl farming first started. On the boat ride, we saw the pearl farms floating off the coast. It was really cold on the deck with the wind blowing and all, so I went to hide below deck. The boat made a stop at this pearl shop and we saw how they implanted the 'irritant' into the oyster to form the pearl. My mum also bought this necklace and earrings there.
The boat ride took about 30 mins I think and back on the mainland my mum and I went to look at some pearls for sale and I bought this nice pearl necklace for 2000 Yen. I had exchanged some of the money I had saved over the exam period and my grandma also gave me some extra yen for me to spend (:
We ended up taking another local train back to Ise, it was completely empty so we sat all over the place. When we went back it was around 6pm and the sun had completely set. Dinner, which we had ordered at the ryokan, wouldn't be ready till 7pm. My mother was tired so she went back to rest at the ryokan first while my dad and I went to walk around town. We went to the next station in the town, Ujiyamada which turned out to be much larger than our own station -.-
Dinner was this traditional Japanese meal which consisted of hot soba, some radish thing, fried rice, some fishcake thing, grilled sabah, grilled 10cm long ikan bili, and some other stuff :/ Didn't really enjoy it that much. Then after dinner we went to bathe. When I had heard the baths were the traditional type, I didn't want to bathe, so instead I washed my legs and face, which was still torture because there was no hot water, ARGHHH. SO... COLD!
That night was the only night that I wore socks to bed, because it was so friggin cold :/ The beds were in the usual tradtional Japanese style, like that of the first night's rooms. The heating didn't really seem to work either.
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Actually if you're wondering why I'm being so long winded, this is more for my own remembrance more than anything else, and yes, it is VERY long :/ Spent about 1 1/2 hours on this part so far, and still writing more!
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