Bree dresses up for her “VIP Day” at preschool. All the kids with summer birthdays get their “VIP Day” near the end of the school year so they don’t miss out.
Our old TV died; today the replacement finally arrives.
We bought the old TV about 10 years ago, when flat screen TVs were still somewhat new. We had to buy it from a special store, and there were a bunch of confusing technological decisions to make.
It’s sort of odd the way technology works. The new TV costs a small fraction of the old one, and yet is better in every conceivable way. The new TV is bigger, thinner, lighter, easier to install, more power-efficient, and much easier to connect to other equipment. It also has built-in web browser, a web cam (for Skype, also preloaded), games, voice control, gesture controls, and a bunch of other stuff. Apparently you can also use it to watch TV.
To celebrate, Jan declares it’s movie night. The girls pick Kung Fu Panda. Anya and Liya laugh hysterically for the next 90 minutes. Bree thinks it’s too scary.
On the ride to school this morning, Anya asks out of the blue, “Why did people evolve to like houses and stuff with straight lines, when everything in nature is all crooked and lumpy?” This is an awesome question — all the more so because we have no idea what the answer is.
Anya’s Programmers’ Potluck. The 5th grade technology teacher invites the parents to an evening event at which the students demonstrate video games they’ve written. Anya’s game, “Polar Escape”, has the player guide a cute polar bear around orcas (and, somewhat less realistically, evil seaweed spirits) in search of fish (and, somewhat less realistically, birthday cakes).
For bedtime the past three nights, Sabriya has been reading to Jan instead of the other way round. Each night, she’s read one of the short chapters from “Penny and Her Doll”, by Kevin Henkes — which is quite a charming little book. Bree needs help with words that aren’t phonetic (“beautiful”), but otherwise is able to recognize or sound out the rest of the text.
Bree’s pre-K program holds an end-of-year picnic at Madison Park playground. Bree stands in front of teacher Joy, who’s flanked by teacher Kate and Joy’s husband (and school administrator) Michael. Bree’s had a great pre-K year at the school. It’s hard to believe that, in less than three months, she’ll be starting kindergarten.
The girls are out of school for the summer. Jan’s working at home — or, rather, trying to work — when he hears some clomping sounds. He turns around to see Liya walking around. She looks… taller.
Sabriya wears her handmade mortarboard just before her pre-K’s “graduation” ceremony begins.
Last time on the playground…
Liya’s Ballet III class performs at the studio’s weekend-long series of end-of-year ballet shows. They dance to Dvorak’s “Humoresque”. Liya does wonderfully. She’s decided she won’t continue ballet in the fall, although she says that at some point she might like to try a class in some modern dance style.
Seattle to Tokyo. Jan’s mom drives us to SeaTac for our 3:00 pm flight. The flight’s not too bad. The girls sleep a bit on the plane, and at least Anya and Liya can entertain themselves for as long as an iPad’s battery will last. On previous international flights, Liya’s gotten kind of sick, but this time she does fine. Bree’s pretty squirmy, but even she rests for a bit.
Off for Japan! This afternoon, we’re leaving on a three-week trip to Japan. Although Jan’s been back for work a couple of times, we haven’t been there as a family since April 2006. Anya was only 5, and Liya was just 2; they only remember a couple of moments from that trip.
In an effort to tire out the girls so that they’ll sleep a bit on the plane, we get up at 6:15 am and take the girls out for breakfast and a long walk through the Arboretum and its wetlands. Bree’s unhappy about all the mud on the marshland path, but Anya and Liya are happy to be out and about.
After arriving at Narita around 4:30 pm local time, we make our way to the Limousine Bus counter. A friend suggested that the bus might be faster than the train, since the bus can drop us off right in front of our hotel. But we have to wait a while for the bus, and the bus makes three other stops before finally getting to our hotel, so it’s kind of a wash. We eat a few convenience store snacks as dinner; the girls are too tired to do much more than that. We all collapse.
Shinjuku and Ginza. We all wake up pretty early, between 4:00-5:00 am. Angela takes Liya and Bree out in search of breakfast, but everything’s closed, so they end up getting breakfast from a convenience store. Jan and Anya leave a short while later, and walk to Shinjuku Station, but don’t have any luck either, and also end up getting breakfast from a convenience store.
A few hours later, around 9:00 am, we meet up with Anya’s Seattle classmate, Milay, and her mom, Megumi, who happen to be traveling in Japan themselves. We meet at the Starbucks at Shinjuku Southern Terrace, then take the subway to Ginza for shopping. We ignore all the department stores, and head straight for Itoya, an enormous stationery store. The girls start on the first floor (cool pens), and work their way up to the fifth floor (gorgeous handmade washi paper). While we’re there, we stop at the hanko (chop) floor to buy name chops for Liya and Sabriya.
We eat lunch at a nondescript shopping mall soba restaurant; the food’s delicious. As one American author in Japan has observed, if you transplanted a completely average Tokyo restaurant to Seattle, it would probably be among the best restaurants in Seattle. The restaurant’s tables are small, so Anya, Milay, and Liya enjoy sitting at a table by themselves.
We all head back to Shinjuku and our respective hotels for a short nap. Milay meets up again with us later, and we take up her up the hotel’s swimming pool, which is quite high up and has a great view of Tokyo. (The pool is just for hotel’s guests; we pretend we have four daughters.) The girls have fun splashing around and pretending to be synchronized swimmers — their routine seems to involve a lot of grunting. We grab a snack afterwards at the Peak Lounge.
We have dinner with Toshikazu Shinohara, whom Jan met a few years ago through Cozi. He brings along two coworkers, Manabu Ueno and Kazuki Tsuchiya, whom we once hosted at our home for dinner. Toshikazu’s wife, Ayako, had also planned to come, but unfortunately their three month-old son, Riu, has a fever. Tsuchiya-san takes us to a yakitori (grilled stuff on sticks) place called Tori-Beer in Kabuki-cho. The girls get tired again, so Angela takes them home. Jan says for more beers with the men, then back to hotel for dessert at the Peak Lounge.
The subways are fun! The girls look for the extra low-hanging straps.
From the room Anya and Liya are sharing, we have a good view of Yoyogi Park. It doesn’t look too far away, so we decide to walk there in the morning. We stop at the north entrance to the park to watch some people taking riding lessons at a horse riding club. Inside the park, we make our way to the Meiji Shrine, where there’s some sort of activity going on: a Shinto priest comes out and shakes a stick with paper ribbons on it at a crowd of people, who then file inside the shrine.
We eventually reach our destination inside the park: the shoubu (iris) garden. We let Anya and Liya choose our route, which takes us far off the beaten path before we come to the koi pond. While there, we wonder why some people are talking about tanuki (raccoon dogs) — and then turn around to spot a tanuki walking around on a grassy lawn near the pond. We’ve never seen one, so it’s pretty fun to watch it and follow it around a bit. (Angela and Bree see another one, which quickly disappears.)
We continue walking through the garden and come to the irises. It’s the peak of the iris season, and the flooded paddies of blue and purple flowers are spectacular.
At the far corner of the iris garden lies the Kiyomasa Well. This is a small, clear well. As wells go, it’s nice, but it’s just a well. The last time we were here, Anya and Jan had the place to themselves. Now we’re surprised to find a line of people waiting to walk down to the well. There’s a guard posted there making sure people queue up properly. There’s also a sign saying that you can’t drink from the well, so we’re not really sure why everyone’s so keen to see the well. We notice that everyone waits their turn, then walks down to the well and takes a picture of it with their mobile phone. Puzzled, we look up the well online, and learn that some TV programs have featured stories about people who claim their luck improved when they used a picture of the well as their mobile phone background. Maybe it’s luckier if you take a picture of the well yourself, instead of just downloading one. Apparently high tech and magical thinking are not incompatible.
We have dinner at Shi-An Gyoza, a gyoza (dumpling) restaurant in the Park Tower basement shopping mall. They’ve brightened up the place since the last time we were there, but the gyoza are still as tasty.
We walk out of Yoyogi Park at the Harajuku entrance. It’s still before lunchtime, and we’re rushing to get some food in the girls before they all melt — but we’re too late. All three girls begin to whine, drag their feet, and complain that they’re hungry. We can’t get all three to agree on a place to eat. In desparation, Angela takes Bree into a McDonalds, while Jan takes Anya and Liya into their nearest cafe. The cafe, Kyobashi Sembikiya, is famous for its fruit desserts, but also offers a light lunch menu. The cafe doesn’t offer the curry rice the girls really wanted (they only have that at dinnertime), but the girls are so famished, they eat half their lunch regardless. They’re both excited to try the “Fruits Jelly”, a tiny fruit salad in strands of clear jelly noodles.
Wandering back through Harajuku alleys towards station, we happen upon an ukiyo-e (woodblock print) museum on a side-street. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s dicey to try to take the kids to more than one touristy thing a day, but the museum looks interesting enough to bend our rule. It’s small but worthwhile. One of the feature artists is Hokusai, he of the famous woodblock print showing a giant wave with Mt. Fuji in the distance. Anya ignores that picture, and is much more entertained by Hokusai’s sketches of people making silly faces. “This guy had a sense of humor”, she decides. This sense is confirmed in somewhat dramatic fashion by one Hokusai print, “The Battle of Breaking Wind”, which depicts a group of men shooting rays of color out of their behinds at each other. The museum also holds a branch of a tenugui (washcloth) boutique called Kamawanu; we used to live around the corner from the original branch. Bree and Liya buys folding fans. Since everyone’s tired by now, we take a taxi back to the hotel.
We try to get everyone to take a nap, or at least rest a bit, but Bree’s incapable of doing that, so Jan takes her downstairs to a stylish little cafe (somewhat incongruously called the “Deli”) downstairs. Sabriya’s delighted to have a one-on-one adventure with Daddy, and the two of them enjoy a perfect little Sacher Torte.
Afterwards they walk outside through the light rain (it’s rainy season) to a corner convenience store. The girls all love the “Hi-Chew” line of candies. You can get them in the States, but the Japanese manufacturer sells a greater variety of Hi-Chew candies in Japan. Bree discovers two new Hi-Chew flavors: sour lemon and golden kiwi. Bree shares these with Anya and Liya back the hotel. The older girls each start a notebook page for their tasting notes on the new Hi-Chew flavors they find.
Today we head to the one touristy thing the girls have been genuinely excited to see: the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. It’s dedicated to the animated films of Studio Ghibli, which include “My Neighbor Totoro” and many others of the girls’ favorites. The museum’s a bit out of the way, but it turns out there’s a bus that leaves from right in front of our hotel and passes right by the museum.
The museum requires advanced ticket reservations, which we were lucky enough to get for the time we’re in Tokyo. The museum building is quite interesting in its own right; there are lots of little details everywhere paying homage to one or another Ghibli film. The museum shows animated short films produced by Ghibli just for the museum’s own theater. For this month, the movie they’re showing is “Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess”. It’s pretty weird, and Bree finds it scary, but otherwise the girls like the idea of seeing a special movie that can’t be seen anywhere else.
Some highlights after the movie: walking up a tiny iron spiral staircase, playing in the Cat Bus room, and visiting the rooftop garden. There we find a copy of one of the giant magic stones from the movie, “Castle in the Sky: Laputa”, as well as a giant sculpture of a robot soldier from the same movie. We eat lunch in the museum cafe, then spend a very, very long time in the museum gift shop. Anya finds two small plush toys — a fox squirrel from the movie “Nausicaa”, and a red elk named Yakul from “Princess Mononoke” — and is told she can choose one of them. She wrestles with this decision for half an hour before finally choosing the Yakul plush toy. She also buys some toys to give away for her 12th birthday party this year, which will have Studio Ghibli movies as the party’s theme. After checking out some more exhibits (an exhibit about movie projectors and lenses, and a permanent exhibit about the Ghibli movies), we catch the bus back to the hotel.
In the afternoon, Jan does some errands — redeeming our JR rail passes, shipping stuff back home — while Angela takes the girls swimming. We have dinner at Jojoen in Opera City, a fantastic Korean barbecue restaurant. Anya’s been very tired at dinner each night we’ve been here, but she and Liya perk right up when they get the chance to cook food on the grill.
Liya at the hotel’s Peak Lounge, one of Jan’s favorite cafes anywhere. Each day, Liya takes one or two of her small stuffed animals out with her so they can experience some tourist activities.
We take the train back north a bit to an area called Tama Plaza. We’ll be staying for two days at the home of Hiroko Ogawa and Hiroya Otsuki family, whom Jan met during his time at Cozi. They have a 6 year-old son, Go, and two baby twins, Joe and Maya, who are just about six months old. They have a huge house in Yokohama’s Utsukushigaoka neighborhood, and have set up two rooms for us to sleep in.
Also at the house that evening are Hiroko’s parents, who live nearby; her father was always very nice to Robbie and Jan whenever they were visiting on business. We all sit down to a huge dinner that includes some child-friendly options (fried chicken), make-your-own sushi, and some adult-oriented delicacies. Jan likes the isaki (grunt) sashimi.
Tokyo to Yokohama. We check out of the hotel and make our way from Shinjuku down to Kamiooka Station in the neighboring city of Yokohama. Waiting for us there are our friends Kei and Mayuko, along with their three year-old son, Kotaro, and one year-old son, Ryosuke. Jan’s kept in touch with Kei in the 24 years since they met at Waseda University.
Our two families make a short walk from the station to an Italian restaurant, where our friends have reserved a little outdoor bungalow in a small garden. The kids aren’t nearly as interested in eating as they are in playing with an old-fashioned hand-pumped water well they find in the garden. The girls take turns pumping water. Little Ryosuke is delighted to play with the water, and pretty soon he’s sopping wet. Mayuko changes him into a spare outfit, and after going back to the garden, he gets his spare outfit sopping wet too.
After lunch, we take a taxi back to their apartment on a hill overlooking Tokyo Bay. Their boys can’t speak English, and our girls can’t speak Japanese, but playing with toys is a pretty universal language. While Ryosuke goes down for a nap, the remaining four kids play with some colorful little blocks made from corn starch. It’s possible to build stuff out of the blocks by wetting them just a bit and then sticking them together. Around 3:30 pm, we say goodbye and ride back to Kamiooka Station.
After trying out our second round of ramen shops, the kids play a midway game: shooting corks from air rifles at boxes of candy. Go and Anya also play a game of jan-ken-pon (Paper/Scissors/Rock) that runs throughout the museum. The two of them have to defeat five adult shop owners or staff throughout the museum at Paper/Scissors/Rock in order to win a prize. Most of the adults eventually let the kids beat them — but the gruff owner of a candy shop is fairly merciless at trouncing all the kids who come his way. Go eventually manages to beat him. The man beats Anya, but eventually lets her win. Go and Anya claim their candy prize: a lollipop shaped like a bowl of ramen.
In the morning, Hiroya takes us to a nearby park and playground. His son, Go, rides a bike, while our girls borrow scooters. The playground is fairly nice, but the main attraction is a large, airy park building full of ladders, nets, stairs, and catwalks. Even the subfloor contains a maze. The girls happily play in the building for a long time. Stopping to get drinks at a vending machine, we see a dad buy a drink for his son and walk away, unaware that he’s just won the vending machine’s little roulette game and won a free drink. Although the roulette game makes buying a drink just a little more fun, we’ve never actually seen anyone win it. (We ultimately end up taking the free drink so that it doesn’t go to waste.)
Suitably hot and tired, we scoot/bike/walk back to the house, and then get in the minivan for a trip to the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum. This is a pretty amazing food museum dedicated to ramen. The upper floor apparently describes the history of ramen, but we never explore that level because we head straight for the main subterranean level, which replicates a city street from 1958-era Japan — a street in which every food shop sells a different kind of ramen. We’ve come at the lunchtime peak, and each shop has a queue in front, but they move fairly quickly. Angela, Liya, and Bree end up with Hiroya and Go, while Jan and Anya eat together. Each ramen shop offers “mini ramen” bowls about the half the size of a regular bowl, making it easier to sample ramen from multiple shops. Jan and Anya try “tsukemen”, where you get a bowl of cooked noodles and a bowl of soup stock and vegetables; you did the noodles in the soup before eating them.
When traveling abroad, it’s always fun to visit a supermarket, so Hiroya takes us to a supermarket just before dinner. We buy tons of snacks.
At dinner, someone notices that Anya’s behaving somewhat absently-mindedly. Our Japanese word for the day becomes “ukkari” (absent-minded).
After the girls are in bed, we stay up with Hiroko and Hiroya for a while. We take turns holding their six month-old baby boy, Joe, who likes to jump up and down if someone will hold him upright. He jumps and jumps and jumps and jumps until he’s all tired out (as are we).
Yokohama to Hakone. We have some time in the morning before we leave Yokohama, so we go back to the playground the girls loved yesterday. Hiroko drops us off on her way to work, and we say goodbye to her. After a bit of playing, and another shot at the vending machine roulette game, we scooter back to the Ogawa/Otsuki house. Hiroya drives us to the closest Odakyu station, and we say goodbye to him too.
We buy some bakery goods to eat for lunch on the train, and then board the Odakyu “Romance Car” train, bound for the hot spring resort area of Hakone. At the Hakone Yumoto station, we change for the Tozan Line, a cute little red train that chugs slowly up a mountain. The mountain is steep enough that in several places the track actually has a switchback: the train changes direction and begins chugging up the mountain in the opposite direction. Anya and Liya rode this train the last time we were in Japan (when the two of them were 4 and 2), and Anya loved it because it reminded her of a train in a Japanese children’s book she liked. She especially liked all the tunnels through the mountain. The tracks are lined with hydrangea bushes, which happen to be in full bloom right now.
We arrive at the small village of Gora, and walk a few minutes to the traditional Japanese inn where we’ll be staying for two nights. We’ve got a beautiful old-style room with tatami mats and sliding doors, which looks out onto a small garden with a private outdoor bath. We’re there for about five minutes before the girls hop in the bath. Afterwards, they’re happy to change into yukata (light robes).
Dinner is served in our room. It’s a traditional kaiseki meal (set course menu, lots of local and seasonal delicacies) for the adults, and a huge arrangement of kid-friendly options (hamburger, fried chicken, etc.) for the girls. Everything in the kaiseki meal is beautifully presented, and nearly all of it is delicious. One item that is a bit too challenging for us is a soup course that includes a piece of “dried entrails of sea cucumber”. Anya and Jan agree that this ingredient sounds like something one would make up. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything that, to the average American, would sound less appetizing. Liya finally comes up with: fresh entrails of sea cucumber. Regardless, even Anya and Liya try a tiny bite of the dried meat. It’s pretty fishy and salty — probably not something we need to try again, but we’re glad to have tried it.
Jan recounts for the girls part of a speech that was given by the dean of Waseda University’s International Division for the convocation address at the start of his year there. The dean counted the number of days the students would be staying in Japan, something like 280. He then conjectured that every student would get to eat three meals a day, which by his calculations gave each student something like 840 meals, or “tasty dishes”, as he put it. This speech stayed with Jan during his travels. Since we’ll be in Japan about 18 days, this gives us something like 54 chances to try “tasty dishes”. Dried entrails of sea cucumber aside, this dinner definitely counts as a tasty dish.
Hakone Open-Air Museum. The village we’re in turns out to hold a great outdoor sculpture museum. When we ask the front desk for directions, they say we can either go one stop on the Tozan railroad, or they can have a car take us there. We’re not sure what to do, but decide on the car. The car turns out of the hotel driveway, and drives for fifteen seconds before passing a train station. Ten seconds later, it pulls into the museum parking lot. The driver helpfully gives us a card with a number we can call when we’re ready to ride back. “Don’t worry,” we say, “we can walk.”
We spent quite a bit of time taking pictures of the girls clowning around in front of the sculptures.
Outdoor maze
By far the coolest sculpture (to us, anyway) is called “Woods of Net”. It’s a huge wooden dome inside which hangs an enormous, multi-colored series of nets that form a kind of hanging maze. The girls play on it for a very long time. It’s a bit poignant to realize that, if we were ever to come again, Anya at least would be too old to play on it.
After we’re done playing at “Woods of Net”, everyone’s starving. We find a museum cafe, but they don’t have much food, and seem to be out of what they would normally serve. Just before leaving to hike 20 minutes back to the museum entrance, we notice they serve tiny hot dogs, which the girls happily gobble.
Back at the hotel, we have a big meal of shabu shabu, followed by more baths. In the morning, we’d tried the inn’s outdoor “family bath”; in the evening, we go to the main “grand baths”. These are segregated by sex. It’s still dinner time, so the baths are mostly empty. Jan floats peacefully on his own by the outdoor waterfall in the men’s bath. Angela, who has all three girls with her in the women’s bath, has a slightly less serene experience.
Gora to Susono. Even though it’s the rainy season, we’ve had pretty good weather so far — cloudy mostly, some sun, some light drizzle — but today it’s really pouring down. Still, it’s kind of nice to sit in our little outdoor bath one last time before we pack up and check out.
Because of the heavy rain, we forego our plans for a more scenic trip today, and instead head as directly as we can to Susono, a small city that’s home to our friends Beth and Hiro. We take a bus that winds along the mountain roads for an hour before arriving at a factory outlet shopping mall. We have lunch at Mangia Mangia, an Italian place that the girls like. They serve very thin, square pizzas. They’re more like a giant cheese crackers than pizzas, but the test is all right.
We fumble through some more travel. We miss the bus from the mall to the station, so take a station. The taxi gets us to the station just in time to get to the platform as the train doors close. This is a little-used train line in the middle of the work day, so we have to wait for 45 minutes for the next train.
At Susono Station, Beth picks us up and drives us a short ways to her new house. She and Hiro have just moved into a house they’ve spent the last couple of years getting built. It’s huge by Japanese standards. Hiro’s away in Tokyo today, so unfortunately we’ll miss him on this trip.
Beth’s younger daughter Elena (11) comes home from school. It takes a while for the girls to warm up to each other, but eventually Elena, Anya, and Bree play some games. Closer to dinner, Beth’s older daughter Emily (14) arrives as well. We give the two girls two games we’ve brought from the states: Spot-It and Dixit. Beth makes curry rice for dinner. (Clearly, this is the go-to family meal for a parent in Japan.) After dinner, we all play a game of Dixit, which Beth wins by a nose.
In the evening, we bid goodbye to Emily and Elena, who will be going to school early tomorrow, so we won’t be able to see them again on this trip. Beth drives us a short distance to our hotel, which has the unusual name, “Hotel Just One”.
After breakfast at the hotel, Beth picks us up and drives us back to her house. We hang out there for a bit, and then drive to the nearby city of Mishima. Beth takes us to a small but perfect little river park called Gembei-gawa. Apparently the small river used to be quite polluted, but a citizen effort led to its restoration, and now it’s a lush, plant-lined river. There’s a delightful little walkway of stepping stones that goes along the river. At a small bridge, we teach Beth how to play “Pooh Sticks” per A.A. Milne: everyone picks a stick or leaf, drops it at the same time into the river, and then everyone rushes across to the other side of the bridge to see whose stick or leaf comes out first.
In Japan, even manhole covers can be beautiful.
We say goodbye to Beth at Mishima Station, then take the shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. We’re staying the Kyoto Hotel Okura; it seems to be in a nice neighborhood, not far from the Kamo River, with lots of shops and restaurants close by, and right on top of a subway stop. The concierge helps us get dinner reservations at Tosuiro Kiyamachi, a restaurant that specializes in tofu. Since the weather’s nice again, we eat on a tatami terrace overlooking the Kamo River. The girls don’t eat all of their tofu course menu, but the different tofu dishes are all pretty interesting, and at least there’s one simple cold tofu course the girls eat a lot of.
The girls are amassing a collection of small stuffed animals on this trip. They often take one of these animals with them when we go out and about. Here Anya plays with Yakul, a little red elk she bought at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo.
On this trip, Anya and Liya have ended up several times in a room on their own. Few of the hotels have connecting rooms, and we’re too big a group to fit into one room, so so we’re trusting the girls not to make too much noise, etc. So far, this arrangement is mostly working out. (Bree stays in our room; to add her to the mix of kids in a room on their own would be a recipe for disaster.)
This morning, when we swing by Anya and Liya’s room to pick them up for breakfast, Anya happens to be holding the hotel’s freebie toothbrush-and-toothpaste set. “Come on, come on, let’s go!” we say. As we’re waiting for the bus, we notice Anya is still holding on to the toothbrush. “Why did you bring the toothbrush?” we ask. Anya: “I was holding it when you said we needed to go.”
While we’re riding on the bus, we look back and notice Anya is brushing her teeth on the bus. “Anya, what are you doing?!” Anya: “What else am I supposed to do with it?”
Angela and Jan have been to Kinkakuji twice before, but it’s still a spectacular thing to see again.
Bree at Kinkakuji (the Golden Pavillion).
We walk from Kinkakuji to Ryoanji Temple. We stop along the way for lunch. The girls have ramen and gyoza, but we’re happy to get hiyashi chuka, a cold summer noodle dish. We walk past a woodblock print gallery called Gallery Gado, and spend a while shopping inside. The girls get the chance to each make a simple print from a woodblock.
The rock garden at Ryoanji Temple
Around the corner from the temple’s rock garden is a famous tsukubai, or low well.
Before leaving the temple grounds, we stop for a snack of almond ice cream. Anya gets a little silly.
It takes a long time to make the bus trip back across the city. The girls are looking for a change of pace at dinner, and it turns out there’s a good Indian restaurant just down the block from the hotel.
Nara day trip. We eat breakfast at a bakery in the shopping mall beneath the hotel, then catch a series of trains that brings us to the nearby city of Nara, famous for its temples.
We start at Nara Park, home to a huge number of deer. Jan points out the deer to Bree and Liya on the bus ride, but Anya’s nose is in her Kindle e-book reader. As our bus comes to a stop, she looks up and says, “Oh my gosh!” when she finally notices a herd of 20–30 deer sitting on a park lawn.
The deer are mostly tame, but well-known for being somewhat aggressive when it comes to seeking out food. Vendors in the park sell small packets of shika-sembe (deer crackers), but when you buy one, the vendor offers sage advice for how to give out the crackers: “Don’t stop walking.”
Angela buys a pack of crackers, and is immediately besieged by deer. She ends up throwing the crackers away from her and running away. Anya’s somewhat more successful: she keeps moving, breaks off bits of cracker, and drops them on the ground as she goes.
After a mediocre lunch at a very touristy restaurant, we head to Todaiji temple and its Daibutsu (Big Buddha). It’s a huge wooden building housing the world’s largest bronze Buddha statue, about 50 feet in height. This is the sort of thing that adults find more impressive than kids. The kids are, however, interested in the goings-on in the back of the building. There’s a column there with a hole in its base. The hole is said to be the same diameter as the Buddha statue’s nostrils. If you can manage to wriggle your way through the hole, it’s said to be good luck. All three girls are keen to try this. It’s no problem for them. In fact, Bree crawls right through.
Just around the corner from Todaiji is Isuien, a formal Japanese garden. It’s a hot day for walking around, but slightly cooler in the shade of the trees. Even though busloads of tourists get off in Nara Park just a block away, the garden is quiet and nearly empty.
After the garden, it’s a long series of bus and train rides back to the hotel. We find the hotel’s Chinese restaurant is pretty good. Anya’s relieved to find they serve ma-bo tofu, her favorite Chinese dish.
We walk on further, and finally come to two long series of gates so close together they form two tunnels. The girls run on through. When we come to a break in the gates, Jan explains that the tunnels of gates go on all the way up to the top of a mountain, a hike of about 2 hours. “Let’s just walk on for a bit, then we can turn around and head back”, he says. The girls are having none of that. Of course we have to go to the top, they say. And Anya points out that she usually doesn’t like to go hiking — this is a rare opportunity, she says, to go on a hike she actually she wants to do.
So we find ourselves hiking to the top of the mountain. We’re not really prepare for a big hike, but then again, neither is anyone else heading up the mountain. There are plenty of vending machines, snack shops, and restaurants along the trail. We stop for a lunch of udon and soba at one place, then continue on. Towards the top of the mountain, the gates begin to thin out a bit, but it’s still surprising how many thousands of gates there are up and down the mountain.
Jan’s interested in seeing at least one temple or tourist attraction in Kyoto he hasn’t already seen on previous trips, so we make a short journal to Fushimi Inari Taisha. Walking up to the temple grounds from the train station, we come to the first of the temple’s bright orange torii gates.
Jan knows what’s coming later, so he tells the girls that it’s good luck to go through the gate. They see another gate farther on, and Jan tells them they’ll get more luck if they go through that gate. They begin looking for the next gate, and the gate after that. When we reach the back of the main temple complex, the girls say, “Wow!” There’s a long series of orange torii gates, one right after another. They race through it. They come back and go through it again.
We finally reach the top and rest for a bit, then head back down. Bree and Jan get soft-serve vanilla ice cream, while Liya and Anya get Ramune (lemon soda) flavored ice cream. Angela has a bowl of more traditional green tea ice cream from a charming little shop with trailside benches. We eventually make it back to the main shrine complex. It’s pretty impressive that Bree has managed the whole hike without much complaint, and without needing to be carried at all.
We spend the rest of the afternoon resting at the hotel. Dinner is at Salvatore Cuomo, a bistro Jan noticed last night on Kiyamachi-dori, a pleasant side street that runs alongside a small river. We eat pizza and other Italian dishes on an outdoor table by the river.