A bit busy at the moment, dealing with various people and ideas (including stupid ones at my current and soon-to-be-past but-not-soon-enough-for-me workplace).

Anywho, my latest column in BC Magazine is now online, one of the geeky ones that I tend to put out now and then, guess one could say it’s Chapter 1 of “My Cyber-History.”

And while you’re there, check out a feature article on charity group Crossroads Foundation, a feature article on some of Youtube’s Hong Kong stars, an article on a new play being staged by local students, plus the latest column from Mafanjai and all the other regular features and photos.

Just found out about this place via a comment on Facebook. OneNow.

The deal seems to be – they give you a US shipping address. So you can shop from US online shops and that means if the product is only shipped to the US, you can get it; if the web site has free shipping in the US, you get that. The orders are shipped to your address at OneNow, consolidated if multiple orders, then shipped to you via DHL. (Sorry CatCat!) If you have to have a US credit card for payment and you don’t have one, they have a payment service called PayForMe.

I think the deal is you shop using them as a gateway, so they get a percentage of your sales (like Amazon Partner). Yes, that’s how it works.

About the only drawback I can figure is that normally I’m quite okay to use Amazon’s standard shipping rates to HK and if I have to use DHL each time, even discounted (as they claim), that could bump up the shipping charges. Though actually their prices look quite okay – standard delivery (5-8 days) US$23 “base charge” plus US$4.5 per kilo.

But there’s lots of stuff sold online that only ships to the US – electronics, Oakley sunglasses, drugs. Their “partner stores” include Amazon, Forever 21, Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, drugstore.com, Target, Zappos (just bought by Amazon), Urban Outfitters. But they say you can shop at any US web site.

Anyone out there use these guys?

And how come I never heard about them till now?

I’m told that the Fenwicks space has been rented out, taken by someone who managed Bar 109. No idea what he intends to do with the space.

And the Bulldogs space has also been rented out. It will be called Rock School. “Sex, music, alcohol.” Someone told me that fliers being handed out or ads or something have said “second floor” without mentioning the actual street address.

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I know I’ve been pretty lax about my Spike HK Facebook account but I’ll try to do more there. I’ve just uploaded pictures from Tokyo and Kyoto there, and you can view them even if you don’t wanna sign up for Facebook.

View shots of Tokyo here.

And a huge number of Kyoto photos here.

And of course a bit of Engrish.

Several things caught my eye today that I wanted to share, haven’t had time till now.

Just returning from Japan, an article in the NY Times claiming that the hostess profession in Japan is now seen as a glamorous job and is attracting a wider variety of women. But, as the Times points out, one reason for that is that there are far fewer opportunities for women in business in Japan, yet another reason their economy remains in the shitter.

Even before the economic downturn, almost 70 percent of women ages 20 to 24 worked jobs with few benefits and little job security, according to a government labor survey. The situation has worsened in the recession.

For that reason, a growing number of Japanese women seem to believe that work as a hostess, which can easily pay $100,000 a year, and as much as $300,000 for the biggest stars, makes economic sense.

The funny thing (to me) is when I read something like this:

Young women are drawn nonetheless to Cinderella stories like that of Eri Momoka, a single mother who became a hostess and worked her way out of penury to start a TV career and her own line of clothing and accessories.

You might think it would occur to people that women like Momoka must be pretty freaking smart and that they ought to give more of them a chance.
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Hong Kong papers are filled with stories related to prostitution, “compensated dating” and violence.

A “Hong Kong resident of Pakistani origin” was convicted of murdering three women working in “one woman brothels” and received a life sentence.

Another life sentence was handed out to a 24 year old man who committed a most despicable crime. He hired a 16 year old girl for “compensated dating” (why this term gets used instead of prostitution is beyond me), brought her to his flat, killed her, chopped her into pieces that he could flush down the toilet and tossed her head in the sea. (Evidence against him included DNA collected from the pipes in his building.)

The Standard naturally goes into even more gruesome details about the crime than the SCMP, which I don’t think I’ll quote here because they are pretty damned gruesome.

The SCMP did run a second article on the topic, on how this “compensated dating” thing, which mostly consists of underage girls, is being taken over by the triads. They’re trying to stress the dangers:

“The way the young girl lost her life is horrible. We also use the case to demonstrate how dangerous this is when we counsel these girls. But many girls are not aware of their own safety. They will do whatever their clients tell them, such as anal sex or violent sexual acts, as long as their clients promise to pay them more,” Mr Tse said. “They think money is the most important thing and they do anything for money.”

But somehow that doesn’t seem to be working as the girls can earn up to HK$2,000 per trick, as an interview with a 16 year old would seem to indicate.

“I just wanted to make money to buy a mobile phone. I earned HK$400 to HK$500 for dating a guy and I got double that when I agreed to kissing and hugging. I could make HK$1,500 to HK$2,000 for sex services,” she said.

“I have had some terrible experiences. One time, one of my clients suddenly wanted to take off the condom when we were having sex. Another time, a client demanded anal sex and he became quite violent. It was really a painful experience,” Ah See said.

“But then I just thought I was unlucky. Not every client was as horrible as these two.”

This last one gives our officials license to not only talk about the evils of prostitution but also about drugs, since apparently the girl and the killer took drugs together before having sex.

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Sex, sex, sex. Attendance at this year’s HK Book Fair was up 8% over last year, with 900,000 people going. What helped account for this increase?

Wong Hing-hung, an assistant publishing manager, told local media that photo albums showing sexy teen models had boosted business volume by 40 per cent.

Go! Go! Pseudo-model!

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Regarding the Australian man involved in that accident with the taxi driver in Central, the one who tried to drive off and has been accused of murder, his parents are now in HK and trying to rally support for him, including having a Facebook group and a web site. But so far the police have failed to state why he is being charged with murder.

Mudd’s blood-alcohol level was determined to be 184 milligrams per 100ml, over three times the limit, senior court prosecutor Edmond Chan Pak-fai told the court. The maximum is 50mg/100ml.

But he was a passenger in the taxi, not the driver, so his blood alcohol level is irrelevant, right?

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Last but not least, following a series of well publicized accidents involving minibuses, including one last week where a speeding minibus plowed into the back of an overloaded truck, resulting in 4 deaths, apparently our official reaction “might” to be to require speed governors be installed in all minibuses, making it impossible for them to exceed 80 kph. Until the drivers take their buses to some local garage and pay mechanics to disable the governors?

The department said it hoped speed controllers would be installed in all minibuses in phases, starting with new vehicles, from the end of this year, while studies on installing “black boxes” in existing minibuses would continue.

Black boxes? In minibuses? Yeah, you read that right. We’re spending tax payer money to determine if we should put airplane-style black boxes in minibuses. And why? They won’t do a thing to prevent an accident. And usually after an accident, it’s pretty simple to figure out why the accident took place.

Now if I’m not mistaken, minibus drivers are paid all or in part on a commission basis? And if that’s the case, aren’t they speeding because they want to go around their route fast enough to get in another complete circle by the end of the day to make more money, because the money they make is shit? And if you changed the compensation system, maybe they’d no longer feel the incentive to drive so recklessly?

But of course that would mean cutting into the bosses’s profits, and that kind of regulation is anti-business, and in Hong Kong business is more important than life.

Came across this Korean company, Seculine, via one of the photography blogs. They make several useful looking doohickeys for photographers.

The images here are all quite tiny but clicking on them will take you to much larger, more readable versions.

Managed to find the Action Level at BIC Camera in Kyoto, and it was selling for roughly the same price that Adorama sells it for on Amazon. Basically you mount this on top of the camera (in the hot shoe) and the lights on the back tell you if your camera is level or not.

They make two other things along this line – one that beeps as well as lights up, which BIC didn’t have in stock. And one where you mount the sensor on the camera and then get a wired thingie with the read-out that you can hold in your hand.

Another product they have is this thing that serves as both a lens cap as well as a way to more accurately adjust your white balance.

This is something I don’t need but could see how it might be useful – an electronic viewfinder that you can flip into a variety of different positions.

And something called Prodisk, which includes white balance filter, gray card and color balance card.

Their web site is one of the worst I’ve ever seen, but I was able to download a PDF of the instruction manual for the Action Level (because mine came with a Japanese manual, not that it’s so complex that you really need one).

Any of this stuff sold in HK?

Yesterday I check out of the hotel, I’m waiting for the van to come and take me to Kansai airport, I go outside for a smoke, look up and it’s sunny and gorgeous blue skies in Kyoto. Well fuck me sideways. I mean, I had a decent enough time there but bad luck with weather and this was just adding insult to injury.

After almost 2 hours sitting in the back of a mini-van (one stop to switch vans, one bathroom stop along the highway), at the airport Cathay upgraded me to business, so that was nice. But it seemed to me that the food on the flight has gone downhill – there’s still a lot of it, but the entree just didn’t cut it, seemed to be more like the quality of what one used to get in economy. One extremely tough piece of cheap beef in a sweet Japanese sauce, some sticky rice and some vegetables that had the life cooked out of them a year before. Starters made up for it – two small pieces of duck breast and a bit of pate, soba noodles, salad, bread. And dessert included the usual cheese and biscuits, fruit, ice cream and chocolate. Maybe I shouldn’t complain because it was a free upgrade, after all, and I can just guess at the horrors being served down below in economy. Clearly CX is cutting back thanks to them having yet another bad year.

When a flight is just 3 hours and 5 minutes, choosing to watch a 130 minute movie can be a mistake. First you gotta wait about 20 minutes for them to turn on the entertainment system. Then you gotta sit through 10 minutes of the same exercise video they’ve been showing for years, the same Jackie Chan charity video they’ve had for years, blah blah blah. Then scroll through the movie list, pick a film, sit through even more commercials and finally the film starts. So do the math …. 3 hr 5 min flight, 129 min film, wait 30 minutes for the movie to start, pause once or twice to hit the toilet, and they shut the entertainment system down 30 minutes before landing. I hadn’t done the math in advance and so I didn’t make it quite to the end of the movie.

The movie in question was The Boat That Rocked. A fictionalized version of UK pirate radio in 1966, it’s directed by Richard Curtis, whom we all know and love thanks to Black Adder and Mister Bean, but his sole previous directing credit was Love, Actually – and this is Love, Actually set on a boat.

Famous names in the cast included Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Jack Davenport and an uncredited Emma Thompson whom, Bill Nighy informs us, was a “sexual superstar” in her youth.

I’m sure there are some good tales to tell about pirate radio. And I’m sure that elements of real DJs and real tales were worked into the script. And I’m also sure that telling a fictional story about a fictional station with fictional DJs was a lot cheaper to produce than going out and actually paying a dozen people for the rights to their life stories. You don’t know who these people were before they got on the boat, no clue what happened to them afterwards (or maybe that’s given at the end of the film). And honestly, you don’t much care. Most of the DJs are portrayed as the 60s equivalent of computer nerds – shy and socially awkward – and there are simply too many sequences where they put on a record and we get a montage of people around the UK listening, dancing, making out and yes, sitting on the toilet (several times) while listening to the radio.

It was all pretty much by-the-numbers stuff, some of the usual funny bits you’d expect, a few manipulative tear-jerker moments, and it went on forever without too much narrative force. With the exception of the young kid (having the film start with someone new coming on the boat provides us with our “guide”) who grows up a bit, these people are the same people at the end as they were at the beginning. Frankly, even though I didn’t make it to the end of the film, by the time they shut down the video system I didn’t much care any more.

And now, home again, back in my own bed, insanely more comfortable than the bed at the hotel in Kyoto and not to forget the presence of my gf in said bed at home, and I’m ready to face the week ahead … even though I’m not quite focused yet and can’t quite recall what the week has in store for me, short of us having tickets to go see Harry Potter 27 on the IMAX screen Wednesday night.

Oh, so last night I had all my trip photos (824 of them) copied onto a portable drive from my laptop, and I realized I could plug the drive into my Western Digital WDTV and look at the pics on my big screen TV. Slow …. shortest setting for the slide show is 3 seconds per picture and it seemed to take the box another 3 seconds to load each photo. So 6 seconds per pic, 10 pics per minute, 824 pictures, once again do the math. No, didn’t look at them all last night, didn’t have all night to do that. But once again I am struck by the sharpness and clarity that comes out of my Nikon D300, most photos shot with Nikon 18-200mm lens, some with the new Nikon 10-24mm lens. I’m not talking about my skills with a digital camera (though I am convinced that there were at least a dozen or two of “professional” quality), just how damn good the camera itself is when you get the settings right and you’re pointing it at something as un-fuck-up-able as an ancient Japanese temple or Japanese garden. And this was just looking at the basic JPEGs. When I have time to start dealing with the RAW files and Lightroom, there should be several photos well worth sharing. Given the 100 meg per month limitation on a free Flickr account, do I need to upgrade on Flickr? Use another service like PhotoBucket? I want to share some of these to a potentially wider audience somehow.

Final Kyoto post – until I get home and put up some pictures.

Last night, dinner at Ganko Sushi, a place not far from the hotel listed in Lonely Planet. Of course in Japan, when there is a set dinner that is 7 pieces of sushi, 3 pieces of maki, tempura and udon all for under 2,000 yen, one should not expect much. And I got about what I expected. Cheap ‘n cheerful, neither especially good nor bad.

Afterwards, I went down by the river banks and sat there watching couples sitting there and strolling by. If I was here with my gf, I could see how sitting there with a few cans of beer or a bottle of wine could be a very nice way to spend an evening. A quick stroll through Pontocho and back to the hotel.

Woke up relatively early (for me) and it was raining and I said to myself, “oh.” But an hour later it stopped so I went to Kinakuji, the Golden Pavilion. Busy but not too bad. Reading that it was destroyed in 1950 and rebuilt in 1955 gave the whole thing a kind of Disney-esque feel, at least to me. And in true Disney fashion, before you hit the exit of the temple grounds, you walk through half a dozen gift shops selling some temple-related items but even more things that have nothing to do with it, the usual crap perceived as stuff foreigners might want to buy (and they were). Spotted one stall with a Hello Kitty sign and was hoping they might sell plates of the temple with Hello Kitty standing in front but no such luck.

No time to do anything else, so another taxi back to the hotel. The driver didn’t speak a word to me when I got in and told him where I was going, which is odd here. But he turned out to be the best taxi driver of my entire trip. He pulled out this stack of small cards on a key ring and started flipping through them. Written in English, he’d hold them up and point as we passed various sites. Then he flipped the cards some more to a set that explained that he had cancer of the larynx and couldn’t talk at all, that he’d been driving a taxi in Kyoto for 30 years, and questions about where I was from, what I was doing, how long I was staying, etc. He also had a small white board and would write notes to me when we’d stop for red lights.

So that’s about it. Time to shower and grab some lunch before heading to the airport. Despite rainy and humid weather, despite only seeing a small fraction of the sites, I’ve enjoyed my stay here, charmed by the people, wanting to come back and see more. But I’ll also be glad to get home and sleep in my own bed tonight (and not alone).

Coming up this week – more job searching and also taking care of some medical stuff while I still have health insurance. And dealing with loading 900 photos into Lightroom and picking out the best and editing them and uploading some of them here ….

Saturday night was actually quite boring. Went to BIC Camera (7 floors of stuff that plugs in and lights up) and found some of the stuff I wanted. Walked around Kyoto Station, tonkatsu for dinner, found the 12th floor roof garden at Isetan, good for a night time view of the city and much cheaper than Kyoto Tower – not really much of a night view here anyway. Then back to the hotel around 9 or 10. Didn’t seem to be any point in walking around Pontocho a second time if I couldn’t stop into any of the bars to have a drink, so a few episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and sleep.

Woke up and – hurray! Not raining. So first I walked over to Nijo Castle, closest big attraction to the hotel. About an inch on the map but far enough that by the time I got there, I was already pretty sweaty. Walked the halls of the castle and tried to imagine 400 years ago, when people actually lived there. A shogun and his ministers and bodyguards and army and wives. Tried to picture them conducting business, eating food, making laws, planning wars and probably lots of hot sweaty shogun sex with 3 or 4 hot sweaty shogun wives at a time. Get the impression I’m feeling a bit lonely at this point?

Then walked through the gardens, which were even more spectacular than the buildings. And, speaking of feeling lonely, I seemed to always be 2 steps behind some white guy and his hot (looked like) Filipino wife or girlfriend.

Okay, after the castle, I hopped a taxi – I needed some air con, I needed to sit, and decided to head for Sanjusangen-do, recommended by commenter Daniel. And since the Hyatt Regency was right next door, figured that would be a relaxing place for lunch. The ground floor restaurant was only doing buffet, so I went upstairs to the Italian place where I got a seriously good pizza. My waiter was originally from Hawaii and stopped by my table every five minutes to give me tips on things to check out.

Then Sanju etcetcetc. 1,001 Buddha statues. Each one different, as they were done by 70 different sculptors. Together with 28 larger statues representing 28 different gods – it’s said to be unusual that a collection of this age has remained intact and, unusual or not, it’s seriously impressive. But the 28 of them put together were not as impressive as the 11 foot “main” Buddha statue – one of the nicest I have ever seen. No photos allowed in here (sometimes it doesn’t seem to me as if I’ve actually been to a place unless I’ve taken pictures) so this is the one place where I bought a souvenir book. And I made a small donation, burned some incense and made a silent prayer asking for help finding a job and tossed in a wish for my mother’s health. Thanks to Daniel for the tip, loved it!

After that, I made the biggest mistake of the day. I decided to walk to Kiyomizu-Dera. The walk ended up being at least a mile, if not more, in the Kyoto heat and humidity, and nothing of note to see along the way, just a lot of small shops closed because it’s Sunday. I started hearing thunder, made a few wrong turns, and ended up in a mausoleum as the rain started coming down. Once the rain slacked off, I checked out the huge graveyard behind.

(Seriously, I never like group tours, but perhaps this is one place where booking a one day tour might have made more sense – I would have covered a lot more ground and had an air conditioned bus to sit in between stops. Too late now but noted for next trip to wherever.)

And then back on the road to Kiyomizu-Dera, which is all uphill. And on that hill was a guy walking backwards, pulling up a rickshaw carrying a family of 3. I seriously wanted to jump on the back of this thing but didn’t want to kill that guy who managed to keep smiling and talking all the way up the hill.

At Kiyomizu-Dera, one of the most famous temples in the world, there were stairs. Lots of them. And I confess, at this point, my legs gave out. My sweat rag was completely soaked, as were my clothes, my hair, my skin, my feet. My feet hurt, my legs ached and my shoulders were hurting from the camera strap and camera bag strap pressing the wet t-shirt into me. Hey, I’m not that young any more and I just got over a serious illness, I think I did pretty okay. Anyway, I got part way up the stairs, stopped and took some photos, sat down for a bit, more stairs, more pictures. Then I looked up, saw even more stairs ahead, realized that wherever I went, I’d need to come back down and just gave up. Sat down, marveled at some of the women who’d made the trip in high-heels and platform shoes and thought, yeah, I was young once too.

Walked down the stairs, walked down the hill, stopped in a few souvenir shops along the way (mostly for their air con), and then hopped into a taxi back to the hotel. Halfway back, the driver started having the most amazing coughing fit. It started at a red light but the light changed and he kept hacking as he was driving – I thought he was going to cough up his left foot at the rate he was going. “O genki des kah?” I asked and he nodded and said he was fine and then kept on coughing away. Back at the hotel, looking at myself in the mirror in the hotel elevator, ’twas not a very pretty picture (yes, I took a photo), my face all red, my hair soaking wet and all over the place, argh, maybe people looked at me and thought, “Jesus, this gaijin is just seconds away from a heart attack” but aside from being hot, wet and tired, I felt okay. Hung my clothes up to dry (seriously, they’re soaked), crawled into the shower and now, after I finish this, nap time.

This is my last night here, tomorrow afternoon I fly back to HK from Osaka. If it’s not raining in the morning, I may try to get to the Golden Pavilion before I head to the airport. I will have only seen a tiny percentage of the sights here, not even close to all 17 UNESCO World Heritage spots, but even so, I saw enough to get a taste of it. Kyoto’s pretty damned nice, isn’t it? I’m sorry I waited so many years to come here – had I made a trip here sooner then by now I would have also made 2 or 3 return visits.

Woke up to find the raining pissing down. Not just raining, serious rain. So I figured I’d start the day at the famous Nishiki Food Market, which is covered and not far from the hotel. Thanks to the winds on the cross streets, I was pretty much drenched by the time I got there.

The market itself is not as exciting as I’d hoped. I think if you’re not from Asia it might be a big deal, and it was nice to see some stalls with Japanese specialties laid out … but it’s no Tsukiji by any means. And half the market is now clothing stores and typical souvenir shops – a thousand variations on Hokusai’s famous view of Mt. Fuji, cheap samurai swords, you name it. Now and then a few “real” places selling some genuine artistic stuff, especially Japanese lacquerware, plates and bowls. I found a shop with hand painted fans, with bamboo instead of plastic, and got a couple of those as gifts.

Much like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, I needed Japanese steel. I knew I was not going to find Hattori Hanzo to custom make a samurai blade for me, but I could visit 400 year old knife shop Aritsugu. I got two knives, one a general purpose kitchen knife, the other more heavy duty for cutting through bone. They custom engrave, so I got “Spike” on one and Spike written phonetically in Japanese on the other. I took photos of the guys who did the “final sharpening” and engraving of my knives. At first they thought I was crazy taking photos of them, but when I showed them the pictures, they couldn’t tear themselves away. It occurred to me that plenty of tourists must take photos there but few ever bother to show them to the people they’ve taken the photos of! The variety of knives was what you’d expect from this kind of specialty shop – knives for every kitchen purpose from sashimi to eel to noodles. I would have loved to fill up a bag with stuff from here but this stuff ain’t cheap and the shop was cash-only.

The food market eventually connects to two other covered shopping streets, so I ended up spending several hours checking stuff out. Lots of stores selling “vintage” and “surplus” American clothing, lots of places with wacky t-shirts but none truly wacky enough for me. Each time I’d hit an open area I’d note that the rain was still coming down nicely. Got a couple more Zippos to add to the collection. Discovered that when trying to buy cigarettes from a vending machine, you have to tap a smart card against a sensor to prove you’re old enough to buy them – discovered this by putting money in, pressing a button, and standing there looking bewildered until someone came by, saw my predicament, and tapped his own card on the machine for me.

Finally by 3:30 the rain stopped. Loaded down with packages and soaked through with sweat thanks to the high humidity here, I made it back to the hotel. Shower and a bit of rest is called for before heading out again.

And that means that on one of my only two full days here I did not hit any temples or shrines. The weather forecast for tomorrow calls for 100% chance of precipitation. This is not good, is it? I’m just going to have to wait for occasional breaks in the weather and perhaps rely on taxis instead of walking, but I do need to at least glimpse a few more of the major sites here.

Oh well, I’m still grooving on walking around here. Kyoto is so much smaller than Tokyo so it’s quite quick to get around. And the city is laid out in a grid pattern, so it’s very easy to find your way around. Definitely Japanese, more laid back, people seem very friendly and helpful and of course the food here is great.

So not a complete loss but still quite a disappointment. And no, there’s no opportunity for me to try to stay for a couple of days longer; wish I could.

Photos later, getting this down while the memories are fresh in my tired little head.

For a three star hotel, Monterey Hotel Kyoto is doing just fine by me. They have made up a little English language map of their own, indicating all the restaurants near the hotel, cuisine, price range and whether or not they have English menus. What could be easier?

So I went to Kushikura, a yakitori place where I could fill my belly for around 3,000 yen. Seven skewers, my favorites were the duck with leek and the chicken skin. The “chicken breast with plum labiate” was also quite interesting.

After that, I walked over to Pontocho, the night time entertainment district. Guide books go on and on about this place but honestly, it wasn’t too much – maybe because I can’t drink so bars hold little interest for me and it just struck me as Shibuya or Kabuki-cho on a smaller scale. Some long and short narrow streets and alleyways loaded with bars and restaurants and of course clubs catering only to Japanese men.

Along the banks of the river something (the print on my map is too tiny for my eyes, even with glasses!) couples and small groups sat in the dark talking and watching the water.

Crossed the river into Gion. This is where you’re supposed to be able to see geishas walking around. But all evening, I’d seen groups of guys dressed in white – white shorts, white open robes, headbands. And now I was to find out why, because just as I went digging for my guidebook, I heard a lot of noise. Looked up and there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of men, all dressed like this, coming down the street. There were flags and several guys carrying some huge thingamabob on a platform, and a guy on a horse. They were all shouting – it sounded like “gyoza hey!” and I thought, oh nice, a parade for dumplings, but of course that’s probably not even close to what they were saying.

As the parade passed, I went into the street and followed them. Eventually they reached the Yasaka-Jinja shrine, which Lonely Planet informs me is considered the “guardian shrine of Kyoto.” Lots of people in front of the shrine, on the steps, but the paraders did not go in. They stayed in front for half an hour, chanting, raising and lowering that thing they were carrying, before heading down the street in another direction, perhaps to another shrine.

But at this point, after walking two hours, I was again completely soaked thanks to the humidity here (good for continued weight loss!). So I grabbed some drinks at Family Mart and hopped a taxi back to the hotel.

Tomorrow, more shrines and temples and also the famous food market here, where I may buy some Japanese kitchen knives if I can afford them.