Kyoto

Saturday 30th March, 2024

We boarded the Shinkansen for Kyoto arriving at half past 11 and  jumped into 2 taxis which took us as far as the end of our alley, for us to walk the rest to the house in Gion, Kyoto.

Supper in the local ramen fast-food restaurant where 3 staff worked flat-out serving 12 seats. Simple menu, rapid service and turnaround. One bubbling vat contained the stock, another water to cook the ramen. Great value, too, as Kyoto has a large number of students needing affordable food, like ramen:

 

Sunday 31st March, 2024

We went on a day trip to the extraordinary Nara Park, temple and giant Buddha.

“In Todaiji temple, the largest  wooden building in the world, there is a hole in one of the many massive pillars. If you fit through it you reach Buddist’s idea of heaven.”

We met some friendly deer in Nara, they were quite full of deer cracker, so we didn’t manage to give them all of our supply. By the end of the trip there were still 2 crackers remaining, so we gave them to the pigeons. A few different things were bought from the gift shop such as Shika, the deer and a keyring:

 

Monday, 1st April

Catherine did an pre-breakfast run.

Morning walk up to Kiyomizu-dera to explore the enormous temple complex on the hillside before the mass of visitors arrived:

 

Cutting coffee and muffin  breakfast short, I  legged it over to the Taiko Lab studio for the much-anticipated drum lesson, which outdid my expectations and, above all, was great fun. It was one on one with an experienced player, Ichi, age 30 and a very enthusiastic teacher, who quickly covered basics of grip, breathing and stance, then went straight into some warmup rudiments using call and response, gradually raising the tempo. For the second half of the session we learned a simple but effective number. One thing that intrigued me was how the numbers are tabulated or scored, but the answer is that they are not. As with Indian music, notes and phrases are repeatedly spoken with the hand movements to build muscle memory.

Evening visit to the Fushimi Inari Shinto shrine, with its 10,000 torii gates: