A Mystery Walk

Last week, one of the teachers invited me to hike the mountain behind the school. Well, actually he wasn’t going, so I’d be going with a few other teachers (who didn’t look thrilled to have me join them. More nervous, as in “how we will speak enough English to talk with her for several hours??”) But I gamely agreed, because really, how much chatting do you need to do while hiking?
I was told to go to the junior high school where the science teacher, who was not going hiking, would drive me to the meeting spot. This really confused me, because the mountain is DIRECTLY behind the school (see the photo above, taken a few months ago). I thought, maybe there’s a good trailhead near the elementary school he will drive me to. So I took the bus to the junior high school, and on the way, saw many people doing a neighborhood cleanup (at 8 am on a Sunday! I’m not usually out and about on Sunday mornings, so I wasn’t sure if this was a special event, or if they spend every Sunday morning cleaning. But it turns out that was part of the day’s activities).
At the junior high school, the science teacher drove me about a mile down the road to the elementary school. We parked and wandered into the school yard, where a couple hundred people were milling about. I never did figure out what exactly we were doing – my closest estimation is that the PTA was putting on a neighborhood cleanup and “mystery walk”. Apparently the hike up the mountains was not a casual hike with a few teachers, but the whole neighborhood on a mystery walk. I was assigned to a team with three other teachers (who, again, looked kind of scared to have me on their team). Each teacher and the principal and vice principal made sure I knew that we would be climbing the mountain. Yes, I was prepared to hike the mountain. Then they wanted me to be in the know that there are no toilets on the mountain. I must look like a totally city girl to them!
So we set off, walking back towards the junior high school where I started that morning. But on the way, we stopped at a temple to answer some “quiz” questions for the mystery walk, and one teacher had to move dry beans from one bowl to another with chopsticks (a mystery walk challenge). The teachers searched around the temple looking for signs with answers to their questions. I, not being able to read the signs, stood around and took this photo of Jizo. You can see that there was a fresh offering of food to Jizo – beer, yogurt and a rice ball! I was told this temple/statue of Jizo is to protect the river.
After they found the answers at that temple, then we headed off, the opposite direction of the mountain, across the river to a little shrine. I was just going with the flow at this point, but we were jogging to this shrine to beat the other teams. I was more concerned with saving energy for the hike ahead of us, assuming we ever turned around toward the mountain. Once again, the teachers searched for the answers to their quiz, and then we walked back towards the junior high school. I was instructed to use the bathroom there.
[Quick side note, I’m sure I’ve mentioned the obsession with changing shoes. We went in the school door, I changed into my school shoes for the walk down the corridor, then in the bathroom I changed into the toilet slippers, then changed back into my school shoes to walk back to the entrance and change back into my outdoor shoes. That’s four shoe changes for a two minute bathroom break!]
After the bathroom break, we went to a shrine right behind our school – I didn’t actually know it was there, so that was interesting. Again, more searching for quiz answers while I snapped these photos of the shrine's roof, and then we were off to finally climb the mountain! It was a steep climb to the top of the mountain and I fell back to chat with some 10 year old girls on the way up. On top of the mountain, there was more searching for the clue and a short break to snap these photos of our team and the scenery. That's our school (with the sandy playing field) at the base of the mountain, and the ocean in the distance. Then our leader pointed to the next mountain over with a radio tower on top of it, and said “that mountain, next. OK?”. I began to worry. At this point it was 11:30 am and we had been wandering around for a good two hours. All at a speedy pace, because this mystery walk was actually a race! But I followed along, and luckily, the second part of the trail wasn’t as steep. We did stop off at an ancient tomb on the mountainside, which was interesting but empty. And from one point of the hike, we could see Himeji castle in the distance. You can't really make out it in the photo, but the scenery is still interesting. There were at least two other stops, which I assume were checkpoints. We then descended the mountain and walked back to the elementary school, where we took our shoes off to go into the gym. I was given a lunch ticket (bonus!), and we each got a prize (I’m not sure if we won, or if everyone got a prize) – a Miffy dry erase board. One of the teachers told me no one would use that prize – I’m sure he’s right. And we each got a package of garbage bags (more about garbage in a later blog, but garbage must be placed in special garbage bags, so this is a very practical prize). We ate lunch sitting on the gym floor – it was fairly tasty – rice balls and soup, which I tried to call cabbage soup, but was told no, it was not cabbage soup because the leafy vegetable which closely resembled cabbage was called something else. But I’m still calling it cabbage soup.
So that was my not-so-casual hike and aptly named "Mystery Walk" up the mountains behind our school!

My third trip to Kyoto!

Karen and I had long planned a weekend trip to Kyoto. Our first plan was to get a hotel room, but between the holiday weekend and the fall colors, we knew we didn’t have a chance at finding a place. So we made two days trips out of it. Kyoto is only about an hour and a half train ride from Himeji, and it’s an incredible city! I’m not really up on my Japanese history, but apparently it was the capital of Japan a long, long time ago. Anyone planning to come visit MUST make this part of their itinerary. It’s full of temples and shrines, geishas and everything else you imagine about Japan!

We decided to focus our first day of sightseeing on the northwestern part of Kyoto. But first we started with lunch at my new favorite restaurant, Jolly Pasta. (My dad asked me the other day if I was learning to like Japanese food. My honest answer was “No, but I like Italian food, and the Japanese do a pretty good job with Italian food” (if you’re careful not to get the dishes they’ve “enhanced” with fish eggs or squid ink or god knows what else.)) So we feasted on pasta and garlic bread and pizza and Pepsi and tiramisu before starting our sightseeing.


Our first stop was the famous Golden Temple. It was beautiful, but packed, as we were soon to discover all of Kyoto was. The story behind the Golden Temple is that is was originally a retirement villa for a Shogun (who wouldn’t like to retire here!). After his death, it was converted into a temple. Then in 1950, a Buddhist monk “consummated his obsession with the temple by burning it to the ground”. Talk about devotion! It was rebuilt in all its splendor.
The next stop was Ryoanji Temple which had a rock garden. Somehow Karen and I managed to completely miss the rock garden (I think we were avoiding the big crowd of people taking off their shoes to enter a building) and were nearly out the exit when we realized our error. We turned around and joined the shoeless people in the building and found the rock garden. The garden was lovely, but I discovered another quirk of the Japanese people. They do not push to get into a bus or train. Instead they make a nice orderly line to get on. But put them in a Zen Buddhist temple in sightseeing mode and they are as pushy as Americans at the mall on Christmas Eve! Karen managed to find a nice spot to appreciate the garden, but I snapped my photos of it and moved onto to a quieter spot in the temple. Needless to say, I was not feeling the “zen” of the temple.

Ninnaji Temple was our last site for the day, and we reached it with just an hour to spare before dusk. It was a huge temple complex, and we were so lucky to witness a group of monks praying. Here’s a short clip of the video I filmed of them. The guy closest to the camera would clap two pieces of wood together when it was time for them to finish a chant. It was fascinating to see!

We returned to Himeji for the night where I took a photo of this – a guy selling octopus dumplings and beer out of the back of a van!

We returned to Kyoto on Sunday to focus our attention on the area near Gion. We started at the Heian-jingu shrine. This was one of the shrines I saw the previous weekend but didn’t have time to see the garden. The garden was lovely (my new favorite word, along with “divine”, both picked up from Suvanya’s South African English) and had a Chinese inspired bridge, as well as this footbridge with its warning sign. Lots of Japanese children like to pose for photos standing on one leg with arms spread wide, so I decided to do the same, since I had footing sufficiently and so on.
I also enjoyed this sign instructing us not to “touch life in the pond”. For some reason, it made me think of some sort of primordial ooze that I shouldn’t touch.

Our next stop was a temple called Kiyomizudera. It was huge, and beautiful and crowded with Japanese tourists, like every other site in Kyoto this weekend!

If you drink from this waterfall, your ailments will be cured. Karen and I did not have any ailments so we passed on this water of dubious quality.
This little guy is a both a Shinto god and a Buddhist god-like figure.
Very crowded Kiyomizudera
We stopped for an early dinner at a little restaurant which had an English menu. Unfortunately they were out of about half the items on their small menu, which left us with the Om-Rice (omelet and rice). Om-Rice is a popular dish available at most restaurants - basically a mound of rice with an omelet cooked over it and some sort of sauce or gravy. They brought out the first plate of Om-Rice, but apparently this restaurant’s specialty was barely cooked omelet and rice. Karen was hungry enough to eat hers, but I was very proud of myself as I stammered out “nama” (the word for raw) and crossed my arms at my wrists to indicate “no”. Who needs to know how to form a sentence in Japanese! My strategy is to learn key words and body language, and it’s working! They took my barely cooked omelet back into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with cooked omelet! Unfortunately that only made the dish barely edible, because the sauce on this particular version of Om-Rice was Thousand Island dressing poured liberally over the rice. To re-cap, dinner was rice, drenched in Thousand Island dressing and topped with raw egg. Only the Japanese could come up with that combination. And I think Karen has been here too long. She started to say she thought her family would enjoy Om-Rice when they come visit. I gave her a look that said “you’ve been here too long”, “this is disgusting”, and “what sort of food did you eat at home if you think they’d enjoy this?” All in one look! I’m getting good at this non-verbal communication!

After dinner, it was too dark to see any more sights, so we headed back to the Kyoto station which was lit up with Christmas decorations. And crowded enough to make us believe we were traveling on Thanksgiving weekend!
On the train ride home, we met this young woman, a university student studying “environmental humor”. I’m still not clear what that might be… I asked her if it was a science and she said no. So I’m clueless. Anyway, she was dressed in a Cos-Play outfit that is apparently the Japanese answer to Goth. It’s kind of cute, but reminds me of Little Boo-Peep.

So that was our weekend in Kyoto. Amazingly, there are still hundreds of temples and shrines which I still haven’t seen there – including some of the major attractions! It’s really an incredible place!

The Last Samurai

Last Friday was the Japanese Labor Day, so we were very lucky to have a three day weekend after Thanksgiving. Heather and I decided to visit Mount Shosha which is one of the mountains around Himeji. It’s also the site of much of the filming for The Last Samurai. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, everyone in Himeji has a Tom Cruise story.

Heather and I started out our adventure with lunch. We went to an okiyomiyaki place for lunch. Okiyomiyaki is often described as an omelet, but really, I’d say it’s more like a crepe piled high with cabbage and smothered in mayonnaise. It’s not bad, but the real reason we went to this restaurant was the potatoes and cheese dish on their menu. After making it very clear to the waitress that we did NOT want spicy cod roe on it, we also ordered a corn dish and a chicken dish (I think we were still on a Thanksgiving dinner high).

Then we headed to the bus station to buy our bus and ropeway tickets. The bus was packed with other tourists (apparently everyone else in town had the same idea). The bus passed the long line of cars waiting to park at the cable car station, and we hopped onto the cable car. It was a nice ride up, even if we were packed like sardines into the cable car.

On top of Mount Shosha is the Engyoji Temple complex. It’s really quite large and it was a bit of a hike to see everything. We can’t claim to have understood everything we saw. There were a few signs in English but they didn’t really clear things up for us.

For example, this sign is for something called Benkei's hand stone. "According to legend, the two child geniuses came down from heaven and landed here on this stone to protect the temple". Who is Benkei? And what's the story with these child geniuses from heaven?Another sign: "Legend has it that a young priest drew on Benkei's face while he was napping. When Benkei woke up, everyone was laughing at him, and he didn't know why until he looked in this well to see his face. A fight then started and the temple is said to have burned." Makes you think there has to be more to this legend, doesn’t it…
And we have no idea who this guy is, and why everyone is swabbing his head.

And we were a little bit confused by these statues called the Thousand Armed Kannon. Kannon is the goddess of mercy. But clearly she doesn’t have a thousand arms. In a guidebook description for a site in Kyoto, I read that one can use a “nifty Buddhist mathematical formula that 40 arms are the equivalent of 1000 arms because each saves 25 worlds.” That just muddies the waters further - she still doesn’t have 40 arms. And what 25 worlds? And I thought Buddhist didn’t have “gods” exactly.

So it was a day spent in confusion, as many are here for me. But it’s a good lesson in going with the flow, something I thought I had perfected while in Kenya, but I guess I need a bit of review. Or maybe it’s a lesson to hire a tour guide? Nah, confusion is more fun!

Thanksgiving

Our original plan for Thanksgiving dinner was a traditional sort of potluck. But no one has an oven, and turkeys are really expensive, not mention all the rest of the ingredients needed for a tradtional Thanksgiving dinner. Then, a French restaurant here in Himeji decided to offer a Thanksgiving dinner buffet, so we quickly reserved the whole restaurant - 32 of us! We were a very diverse group - Americans, Australians, Germans, English, an Irishman and a few Japanese people thrown in for good measure.

And while we ate dinner last night at 7 pm, we thought of all of you back home - just waking up to put the turkey in! Happy Thanksgiving!!

It was great - and the best part - no clean up!!! Except for the restaurant staff.Karen, going back for seconds! (I was right behind her filling my plate up again!)

Our table - Mike, Karen, me, Suvanya, Heather and Colm.The only disappointment - no pie for dessert. But I was too full to do much complaining.

And to further put us in the holiday spirit, we appreciated the holiday decorations put up in downtown Himeji. The first photo is of Muyidori, the covered shopping arcade. And the blue Christmas tree is on the front of Himeji station. You can't see from this distance, but instead of ornaments, it has four or five large white egrets (the city bird).

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Bicycling Around Kyoto

On Saturday, I went on a bike tour of Kyoto with Taube and Julian. It was a really nice tour – with two guides who both spoke excellent English (I would definitely recommend this company to those you planning to visit.) We went on the “mystery” tour – which consisted of little known temples and shrines in Kyoto. We had some extra time at the end, so we also stopped at a few more well-known places. It was a perfect fall day, and the leaves were gorgeous, so Kyoto was very crowded, particularly with dogs and their owners who apparently also appreciate the fall colors. I thought dogs were color-blind... We started at Mimizuka, a large mound that was enclosed with a fence. The guide explained that historically, a samurai would bring back the heads of people he killed in battle, as proof of his victory. However, from the seven year war against Korea (1592-1598), the samurai only brought back the ears and noses of the 38,000 people he killed. These ears and noses were buried in a mound and Korean people still come to pay respects to their dead.

The next stop was Rokudo-chinno-ju, a little temple which is considered to be a passageway to the underword. A well in the back of the temple was used to commute between the two worlds. It was a quiet place this Saturday, but during Bon-Odori, a festival in August when families welcome spirits of the dead, the place is very popular.
We went next to Yasuikonpiragu, the shrine of break-ups! This was a most amusing place. If you have a relationship you want to end, you write that person’s name on a slip of paper and tack it onto this mound of paper. Then you go through the hole to clear yourself of that relationship. You can then turn around and come back through to bring good relationships into your life. There were plenty of “love hotels” around the shrine, so clearly there is some karmic energy here. Julian threw in a 5 yen coin (considered the best coin to throw in before praying because the word for 5 yen, “go-en” is also a word meaning “close relationship”) and made a wish. We don’t know what he wished for though… There were lots of these placards at the shrine, as there are at any shrine, but these placards mostly contained wishes for ending or beginning relationships. Our guide translated a couple of them for us and told us it was OK to read the ones on top, but it’s rude to dig through the pile of placards.

On to Kennin-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple. Our tour didn't include the admission fee to enter the temple, so we just wandered around the grounds. I’ll have to go back another time to check out the inside. However, we did see a monument to the man who brought tea to Japan. We joked that instead of seeking enlightenment, he could have made a mint of selling tea here. He would be richer than Bill Gates by far!


Next, we went on to Gion which is a famous geisha district. We walked through narrow little streets and saw some people who had been dressed and made up as geishas for fun (the real geishas don’t come out until evening!).

We wandered right into Maruyama Park which was the first real “park” in Kyoto (historically, Japan has had “gardens” and parks were a concept introduced by Westerners). It looked quite a bit like a garden to me though, except for the foreigner playing guitar and singing on the park bench.

Right next to the park was Yasaka-jinja, a shrine that’s popular to visit on the first of the year. We walked through that quickly, and then biked past Chion-in Temple, which was filmed in the movie The Last Samurai (much of the rest of the movie was filmed on Mount Shosha which is in Himeji. Everyone in town has stories to tell of Tom Cruise and how the hotels in Himeji weren’t good enough for him, so he stayed in Kobe and took a helicopter to Himeji every day!)

Then on to Nanzen-ji which has an aqueduct running through the temple grounds. This place had tour buses of people there to see the fall colors. Our tour guide said he had never seen it so crowded!
Our last stop was at Heian-jingu. It’s a large shrine complex with a beautiful garden. We didn’t have time to see the garden so I’ll have to go back. There were lots of families there with their young children all dressed up in kimonos. Our guide explained that the holiday 7-5-3 (for girls age 7, boys age 5, and both boys and girls age 3) was on November 15, but restaurants were booked months in advance. So many families pick another date in November to celebrate, and take their children of the appropriate ages for professional photos at shrines (and to pray for their continued good health).

The other interesting site at Heian-jingu is the HUGE torii (red gate). Most torii are around 8 feet tall, whereas this one towers over everything!

So that was our very full afternoon in Kyoto! It made such a difference to have guides, especially guides who spoke great English. We certainly saw a lot more than we would have on our own!