Darren Holloway

I am in Kanazawa right now – the Wikitravel article says to “remember your umbrella, because it rains a lot.” Of course, I left my $5 umbrella in Osaka.

My first two days here, the weather was pretty nice and warm – I thought “wow, I don’t see why they say it rains all the time.”

You guessed it – whistling at the wind. It rained all day today.

Tomorrow I leave here for Tokyo, and my last full day in Japan. Then a nice (sarcasm) 14 hour plane ride, and I return to my normal life of sitting in a cubicle for 10-12 hours a day instead of exploring temples and shrines. Oh well, the vacation was nice while it lasted, and work is what enables me to take a month off for travelling.

Tonight, I had nowhere to stay. I couldn’t extend my stay at the hostel in Kyoto because they were full, and I couldn’t show up in Kanazawa a day early because they don’t have a room for me tonight. After much deliberation, I decided to just take an easy day, then spend the night in a manga cafe.

I took the bus from the hostel to the JR train station and put my bags into lockers (600 yen, about $6) and took only my Japanese textbook, dictionary, notebook, pens, and my camera with the 50mm/1.8 lens with me.

I spent most of the day hopping around between different coffee shops; studying for a few hours, then moving to try a different chain. Got a lot of studying done!

At 10:00 pm, I headed over to the Manga cafe, and between my basic Japanese and their broken English, managed to get everything arranged.

So here’s what I get for 2750 yen, or about $27 (350 yen membership + 2400 for 12 hours):

I get all the bizzare Japanese soft drinks and soft ice cream I can handle. I’m drinking a pepsi float I made right now – tastes pretty good, but could use some rum. Perhaps I’ll run down to the convenience store and pick up a $3 mickey of Captain Morgan’s rum; yes, booze is incredibly cheap here.

More Manga (japanese comic books) than I could read in a dozen lifetimes, especially since my rate is about 15 minutes a page, what with having to look up all the kanji. Note this is just one of the rows of bookshelves.

An eerie walk down the row of dimly lit cubicles with zen sand sculptures under the transparent floor and “relaxation” music quietly playing.

In my cubicle, I have a PC, a Playstation 2, a 24″ television (not shown) and a small safe for my valuables that I managed to lock without setting the combination – Did I mention about having to look up lots of kanji?

I also have a sofa that’s long enough to lie down on, but not quite long enough to fully stretch out. Still, it’s far better than airplane seating.

Not shown – washrooms, showers, beer vending machine, row of slot machines, &c.

Now, granted, there’s other people moving around, making noise, &c, but that was true at the hostel. I just wish I’d thought to bring my earplugs with me for tonight…

One of my room-mates here at the hostel is French, and he has a French-Japanese phrase book. Naturally, it has a whole section on picking up women (or men), telling them you love them, and what to grunt during sex.

I should have come to Kyoto first, rather than going to Tokyo first. Here in Kyoto, you can’t swing a dead panda without hitting three temples and two shrines, yet I’m beginning to show the dreaded signs of shrine-and-temple burnout.

Every day that I’ve been here, I’ve come up with a plan, and then ended up discarding it because I’ve become lost. I think I can safely say that Kyoto’s subway system is the worst one I’ve ever experienced.

To wit: There are different subway companies here, as seems to be normal in Japan. However, unlike Tokyo, they don’t share stations – they built stations a few blocks away from each other. And in many cases, they give the stations the same names. So, you think “I have to walk a few blocks to transfer to the Maratumatchi station,” but you walk in the wrong direction and find the other Maratumatchi station, then try to figure out where the heck you’re going.

Plus, add the fact that the closest station to the hostel had its name changed recently, and it doesn’t show up on most metro maps under either name, and you may judge my agony.

On the positive side, or negative, depending on your point of view, as of today I had to unfold the duffel bag that I brought to pack with stuff to bring home. I’ve been resisting buying anything that I couldn’t cart around in my backpack, but I finally found a few things that I’ve been searching for almost since I arrived, and I didn’t want to take the chance that I won’t find them again.

As of tomorrow, I have one week left… and as is becoming traditional, two photos…

Darren with cute girls, this time in kimonos.

Sakura and Building detail

From Okayama, I made my way to Osaka, with a six-hour stop in Himeji to visit the castle and take pictures. I don’t have any to upload right now, as they’re all in the hands of the Japanese postal service right now.

Overall, I have to say that Osaka has very little to recommend it, other than the really cool ryokan that I stayed in. When I arrived and was shown to my room, there was a teaport, a container of tea, a thermos of hot water, and some Japanese sweets sitting on the table.

Oh, and they have just as much neon as Tokyo, but at least they do interesting things with it. This was taken about 3 blocks from my Ryokan, which took me from the “wall to wall girlie club zone” I was in to the “overpriced European brand name shopping zone.” They’re beside a bridge over a river, or at least they are now – it appears they’re trying to pave over the river or something.

Neon signs in Osaka, Japan

I left Osaka this morning, and headed to Yoshino, which is another Japanese World Heritage site, which means temples galore. I even got to see a procession of monks on their way to chanting time.

I saw lots of pretty things in Yoshino…

Darren with Cute Girls in Yoshino, Japan

And there were lots of Sakura as well – not as many as in Tsuyama, but still plenty.

Sakura Blossoms in Yoshino, Japan

I’m in Kyoto right now – My lack of advance planning has me staying tonight in a $200/night hotel, and tomorrow moving to the $25/night hostel.

On the train from Yoshino to Kyoto, there were a pair of girls sitting across from me who kept looking at me, then glancing away when I caught their eye. In good fun, I pulled out my notepad and pen and wrote 何を見ますか :), which means, or was meant to mean, “What are you looking at?” I then looked out the window, waited about 30 seconds, then flipped over the notepad so they could see it and looked back to see them collapse into a frenzy of giggles.

Once they had recovered, one of them pulled out a notepad and wrote Where are you from? in English. I replied (via my notepad) in Japanese, and for the next 20 minutes or so, we had a conversation in each other’s native tongue across the aisle.

Anyways, now I’m in Kyoto, and my first impression is “wow, there are a lot of white people here!” I’ve gotten used to seeing two or three other white people a day, and all of a sudden, there’s packs of five to ten of them.

I’m planning to spend a couple of days here in Kyoto, then off to Kanazawa, then back to Toyko. I only have 10 days left of my vacation! Auuugh!