undershot

We got up a little late, so didn’t get to Kyoto until around midday. The trip up there was nice: about 30 minutes by train, and cost 390 yen. It didn’t take long to get from Juso to a more hilly area. It was great to see some trees!

We took the number 17 bus from Kamamachi (?) station to Ginkaku-ju (temple). Lots of nice little shops near the temple, but a little over priced. Lots of Gaijin too, who all ignored us in the usual way. It’s strange how unfriendly they are.

We ignored the temple and went for a walk on the mountains behind it. Lots of neat little shrines along the way. It was beautiful, and extremely green. I guess Australian eucalypts are more blue. All the local people were happy to greet us. We didn’t see any Kodama, but they were probably near by.

Shortly after we started out, a large group of school kids caught up with us. They just powered up the hill! It was nice to listen to their conversations because their speech was simple enough to understand some of it. They mostly spoke of how hard going it was, asking each other to wait, etc.

Near the top of the first mountain was a huge clearing. In it were fire places arranged in the shape of the Kanji character for “great”. We missed the burning, which only happens once a year, by about 3 weeks.

We continued on past the clearing for about half an hour, following the instructions from our Lonely Planet hiking guide. Somehow we ended up taking a wrong turn, and got lost in spider-infested Japanese forest. We just kept going down the mountain trying to find the city. Eventually we got pretty close, but got stuck just behind a tall barb-wire fence surrounding a school. The cemetary nestled in under the trees made it a bit creepy. In desparation we decided to traspass through the school to get out. We felt pretty dodgy.

We stopped briefly for Okonomiyaki. I tried for a while to get a vegetarian meal, but in the end gave up and had prawn (ebi). The DS translation game was actually really helpful there: the owner would ask if I could eat certain things, and I’d enter them into the DS to find out what they were. If only we’d gotten down the list as far as “sansai” (which I looked up from the menu after ordering), which means “edible wild plants”.

In the end we were too tired to meet up with Kaz and went home instead. Sorry, Kaz!

Kaz waited after his shift while our phones were set up, and then took us out for a drink at a Japanese bar. A seriously cool place with low tables, which we sat at on cusions. Kaz ordered raw octopus (tako) and fish, which I tried (poor things), and also raw chicken, which I didn’t. The tako tasted nice, being served in a wasabi sauce, but I wouldn’t recommend it: it’s too chewy.

Kaz is a really cool guy, and I hope we can keep in touch. He seems to want to learn more English, and we want to learn more Japanese, so it works out well. Tomorrow we’ll try to meet him in Kyoto.

After going back to the ward office to get even more identification, we headed into the cityto meet three other people starting at ECC. We met at “Big Man”, which is supposedly a well-known landmark. A girl helped us eagerly to find it. One of the people we were meeting also had to get help. The first person he asked didn’t know where Big Man was, but she was so eager to help that she was almost in tears by the time they walked off. It turns out that Big Man is a large TV screen under Umeda station. On the other side of the subway gates was another screen called “Co-Big Man”.

Just behind Big Man, Jodie found the book shop (Kinokunyo) she’d been looking for. It’s huge, and they have a good English section.

It was great to be able to relax for a while with people who we could communicate with freely, although I was concious that we were noisier than other patrons of the restaurant and cafe we went to.

After parting ways, Jodie and I went back to the electronics shop to get our phones. Kaz helped again with the extremely complicated Vodafone contracts: We signed up for the family plan, whereby Jodie pays half-price. But, as we were walking away, one girl pointed out that we didn’t qualify for the family plan for some reason. No big deal; we just filled out the forms again. Later when we went to pick our phones up, they said that there’s this great deal where the second person could get the plan at half price because we’re a family. I’m still not sure if that’s what we successfully signed up for it :)

We have mobiles now, and they’re really cool. They’re made by SoftBank, and have all sorts of intersting functions like scanning text using the in-built camera. 3G phones in Australia probably have these functions too, but I never bothered to look into it.

We also visited Koji again to sign up for Internet access. Unfortunately our building doesn’t have fibre, so we have to get ADSL instead, which means paying extra for a phone line that we won’t use.

Koji seemed happy to be speaking Australian again. He said he wanted to have some one-on-one lessons, and asked about what ECC offers (which we don’t know yet). I think he was hoping we’d offer to teach him privately, but I wasn’t sure what ECC’s policy on that is.

We found a wicked supermarket on the way home at Hankyo Umeda Station. It’s just beneath the railway lines, but above street level. They have a large range of spices, so I stocked up on the essentials (cumin, coriander, Tabasco etc.). It was interesting to see the prices: Tabasco and tequila are both half the price found in Australian supermarkets (400 and 1700 yen respectively). A can of beans, on the other hand, is twice as much. I got a packet of red lentils, but it’s pretty small. Still, I don’t intend to cook Indian every night, and this should be enough to quench my thirst.

I’m getting a little more confident with my Japanese, and don’t mind using it when I can remember what to say.

We went to the ward office today to get our alien registration cards (gaijin cards). These are required to apply for services like mobile phones and internet. I think they’re kindof like a visa, but more convenient because they’re not attached to your passport. Registration went smoothly enough. When it was finished, the guy called us up to the counter as “Donald-san” and “Marie-san”. The order in which Japanese people write their names is confusing.

After that we went looking for Den Den Town, which is a street full of electronics shops. The map we had was poor, and we ended up in entirely the wrong place. We did find the ECC head office along the way. We never found Den Den Town, but after wandering around aimlessly for a while we found Labi-1, an electronics store similar to Yodobashi but not quite as big.

We looked around for some mobile phones until an assistant offered to help us. She couldn’t speak much English so she radioed for backup, which arrived in the form of Kazuma. His English was very good, and was distinctly British (ask him to say “Fantastic”). We spent some time filling out forms with Kaz interpreting. We couldn’t finish it, though, because we needed some extra identification (in addition to our gaijin cards). This was to be obtained from the ward office.

Kaz then took us over to the phat inni counter, where we were helped by another Japanese person (Koji) who spoke good English. He had a very strong Japanese accent, so we had to ask him to write some things down for us. He’d spent five years in Cairns, and was delighted to try some Australian slang on us. Unfortunately we couldn’t get inni either because we needed to supply a contact phone number! We returned home defeated.