Unlike the United States, every swipe of a bar code reader is successful. I’ve bought at least twenty to thirty small items thus far and have yet to see one fail, much less fail repeatedly (which leads to the cashier having to type in the interminably long number). But that’s Japan. Everything always works. The one exception is the English language. They need a few good grammarians to spend a summer circulating throughout the country correcting menus, street signs, and the like. Not that it isn’t fun to come across “exercise and helth center here,” “when you ate our burger you get absorbed by it,” or “this coffee is dripped one by one person by one.” I’m also touched that when English does appear on cans and bottles it often informs me of how my life will be enriched upon consumption, such as the ice coffee that promises me “a radiant life.” Oh, yes, I am drinking canned ice coffee—it’s not bad actually, better than Dunkin Donuts certainly. The key is to find the one with little-to-no sugar and not the kind which tastes like it has mixed in a small dairy farm.
We made some amazing trips to the sights of Kyoto. But first, some food updates:
We were taken out to a special club where we had our own chef who cooked everything right in front of us. Among the highlights were Kobe beef. I generally don’t like steak (I find it boring unless it’s acting as a base for some sauce); this, however, was different. The beef was cut into bite-size pieces and cooked rare with an amazing combination of flavors. We would take the piece of beef with our chopsticks and briefly soak it in a mixture of soy sauce, sesame seeds, and other unknown, but extraordinary flavors. The results was the finest red meat I’ve ever had. Sadly, this probably means I’ll like steak even less when I return to the states.
I wanted to have unagi (eel) and we ended up at a restaurant that actually fried it. It was very different from the amazing unagi I had at the Fish Market, but just as remarkable in a different way. We also ate at the Beer Garden on top of your hotel which didn’t have anything particularly fascinating except for a soft tofu which always reminds me of the texture of homemade mozzarella. Tofu is the gentlest of the Japanese cuisine—no matter how much you’ve eaten, there’s always room for tofu. It also seems to de-fragment your stomach, arranging everything you’ve eaten so it is organized calmly and neatly.
What does the opposite might be the fried octopus we had, though it was quite good. We also had countless kinds of mochi, pastries (western style, but usually with an eastern twist like mango and cream croissant), and plenty of green tea ice cream. This morning we had a Japanese breakfast that included okayu, a liquidy rice dish that I loved—kind of a Japanese Cream of Wheat. The one disappointing meal was where the restaurant, assuming our kids wouldn’t like the more unusual Japanese cuisine, gave them more “traditional” foods whenever a course was particularly exotic. My exotic-food seeking children were not pleased, but remained polite. Needless to say I shared all my ‘exotic’ foods with Alex who was sitting next to me.
As to temples, Kyoto is amazing. This one has multiple sections at the top of a mountain:
Here is a particularly beautiful, five-story pagoda, “Kofuku-ji”, not too far from the “Big Buddha”:
Here’s the Big Buddha:
And one of the soldiers on the side of the Buddha’s temple:
And one of many groups of deer that are living in the parks in-and-around the temples:
They are particularly friendly when you feed them. I was swamped by at least ten as I handed out deer-food crackers. One deer I kept missing actually poked my stomach with his snout which—after all the mochi, udon noodles (a very large noodle often eaten in a cold, refreshing soup), and ice cream I had had—almost created an unsightly incident. I held on, but the crackers went flying into the herd and were consumed before hitting the ground. They didn’t seem as cute after that.
