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cyphomandraIt has not been the best couple of weeks as my house turned out to be flood-damaged (still waiting for insurance assessment), my mother is quite unwell, and for some reason all three of the work projects I am doing with various difficult personalities have had terrible meetings where my esteemed colleagues behave like belligerent toddlers, only without the hope that they will one day grow out of it. Anyway. Back to Japan (I wish).
On Friday we took the Shinkansen down to Kyoto - travelling with my parents but separately from my sister and her family, who left a bit later. We used JRail passes to book the shinkansen and specifically asked about booking seats where you can put oversize baggage behind them, having had issues in the past, and because I had chosen to travel with one very large suitcase & individual carry-ons. The staff said that this wasn’t currently necessary (cue foreshadowing).
We got to Tokyo Station early and I tried to interest my children in bento boxes with fairly minimal success. They were much more excited by local snacks - I have a photo with my son sampling a Tokyo Banana (the official souvenir sweet of Tokyo; an appropriately shaped sponge cake with a banana custard filling) with an expression of mild dubiousness while my daughter tucks into a box of lemon-lime KitKats - and then promptly both fell asleep on the train shortly after we left Tokyo. I took the opportunity to eat my own very tasty omelette and salmon bento.
Shortly after we left Tokyo the conductor rolled my suitcase down the aisle, looking for its owner, and told me it was too big, I should have booked the oversize baggage seats, and it would have to go out in the corridor. This was irritating as a) we had asked and b) although I am sure almost everyone in Japan Is terribly law-abiding I did feel the need to go and stand over my suitcase at the stops, as otherwise it was out of my sight.
The trip was smooth and speedy, as expected, and totally unimpressive to my children, alas, as they have no real concept of how fast we’re actually going and how much time they would normally have to spend on a train to do that distance. The snacks & drinks trolley seems to have been downsized with COVID and only does coffee, no tea. I do find it mildly unnerving that we never seem to be out of towns/cities on the route.
We arrived at Kyoto Station - I remember being there in 2009, but my past and more recent mental images appear to be 180 degrees out from each other and I never quite got them in synch. Fortunately our hotel was super close as everyone was getting a little grumpy. Once again, I had told the kids there was a surprise about their hotel; when pressed, I said it was something to do with Pokemon. Shortly before I opened the door my daughter said that maybe there would be a giant Snorlax in their room…
There totally was. We were staying in the Pokemon room at the Mimaru apartment chain, with Pokemon plates and wall decals, and a massive Snorlax to cuddle. We settled in and argued over who would get the Snorlax first. My sister and family arrived and took the other Pokemon room (our parents stayed at an entirely Pokemon-free hotel on the other side of the station) and then we did some shopping and child-swapping. I headed out by myself for dinner because I wanted ramen, and conveniently the entire 10th floor of the station is ramen restaurants. Actually making a decision as to which one was much harder and I ended up with a shoyu one with vast amounts of spring onions in an attempt to eat more vegetables. Tasty but not my best ever.
Saturday
Foolishly I had not picked up anything for breakfast the night before. We went over to the station and (with some difficulty) tracked down a French bakery I’d seen the day before, where you could buy miniature danish pastries by weight. My daughter got increasingly grumpy the longer we took, and as she was wearing snow boots her disapproval manifested via very loud stomping.
Once we acquired pastries, we did some shopping; Uniqlo for fluffy warm jackets for everyone, Yodabashi for toys (including a whole wall of pokemon) and also for me to stare thoughtfully at suitcases, as at the rate my children were acquiring new stuffed toys I would be totally out of room before we left Kyoto. Also, if I bought a medium sized suitcase, I could send my large one back to Tokyo independently (this is a very organised service where you ship them between hotels etc) and avoid being publicly shamed on the Shinkansen again. Met up with my parents briefly and then returned to the hotel with assorted loot and combini snacks for lunch.
I then insisted that we actually visited a temple and took the kids to Kenninji Temple. Rather dismal weather and we kept trying to get in through the wrong entrance, but the temple was great, with a lot of fantastic art, including the Two Dragons ceiling and the Wind & Thunder god screens. I took a picture of my two looking meditatively at the well-raked garden as proof that they didn’t fight the whole time and bought everyone temple charms.
We were meeting my sister and her family at the Samurai & Ninja Museum with Experience at 6pm, so we wandered around Teramachi (enclosed shopping area with lots of cool little shops and a mini pig cafe that the kids stared at wistfully - fully booked and I was rather dubious about how well the animals were treated) looking at ceramics, stationery, clothes, etc, and got increasingly panicked text updates from my sister as the bus they were taking broke down and they tried to find a taxi. Fortunately they made it just after six.
The Samurai & Ninja Museum with Experience was great fun. We had a short lecture about the history of the samurai, for which my hazy recollections of playing Ghosts of Tsushima (for the Mongol invasion) and reading Kaze Hikaru (for the Bakumatsu) turned out to be surprisingly useful, looked at their very nice collection of samurai armour, and then they got us all to put on much less pretty but still reasonably convincing samurai outfits, grab weapons (“it’s up to you whether you let them have the metal ones,” said the guide, but both my two had already grabbed them) and pose in front of a suitable castle backdrop. We now have some fabulous action shots of my sister’s family and my family totally committing to the historical tradition of samurai intra-familial fighting (the guide, a Japanese guy with a very dry sense of humour, was approving - “lots of bodies. Great light. Like Rembrandt.”).
Then we took off the armour and went upstairs to the ninja shuriken throwing gallery, which was extremely exciting for everyone and I don’t know how no-one ended up pinned to a wall. My son got a bullseye and a free shuriken (the rest of us could earn them by writing reviews of the place online, a transactional approach that none the less works well for them) and everyone was quite sad to leave.
We ambled back down Teramachi and my sister got distracted by a fabric shop. I knew my two were going to lose it, but I really wanted to visit a bookshop, so I took my niece and my two to what we thought was a suitable manga shop but turned out to have an entire floor of boobs (in hindsight maybe being called Melon should have been a hint) so we went on to Maruzen, where my niece managed to find a reasonable selection of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure not yet translated into English, and I grabbed a volume of Cat + Gamer (only two volumes out in English so far) before my son totally melted down. I had to abandon my niece and stick everyone in a taxi; we went to my parents’ hotel (they weren’t at our one) for a quick catch-up and calm-down.
In the taxi I found an online review of Maruzen that said English language manga was in the second basement, so I directed my sister there and she sent me lots of photos, and, more importantly, bought me Hikaru no Go volumes 3,5, and 7. I did have a complete run of HnG but lent it to my nephew, who absolutely loves it and re-reads it constantly, so I had to acquire another run for me and those 3 volumes had been super elusive, with 3 showing up for ridiculous prices or not at all, so yay.
We walked back from my parents’ hotel via the station and had dinner at Tonkatsu KYK, because I really wanted tonkatsu; delicious pork, loved the pickles, but we had to queue for about 20 minutes to get in and my kids were totally over it. Staggered back to the hotel and collapsed.
Coming up; meetingnnozomi, the manga museum, and a castle. And then another theme park.
On Friday we took the Shinkansen down to Kyoto - travelling with my parents but separately from my sister and her family, who left a bit later. We used JRail passes to book the shinkansen and specifically asked about booking seats where you can put oversize baggage behind them, having had issues in the past, and because I had chosen to travel with one very large suitcase & individual carry-ons. The staff said that this wasn’t currently necessary (cue foreshadowing).
We got to Tokyo Station early and I tried to interest my children in bento boxes with fairly minimal success. They were much more excited by local snacks - I have a photo with my son sampling a Tokyo Banana (the official souvenir sweet of Tokyo; an appropriately shaped sponge cake with a banana custard filling) with an expression of mild dubiousness while my daughter tucks into a box of lemon-lime KitKats - and then promptly both fell asleep on the train shortly after we left Tokyo. I took the opportunity to eat my own very tasty omelette and salmon bento.
Shortly after we left Tokyo the conductor rolled my suitcase down the aisle, looking for its owner, and told me it was too big, I should have booked the oversize baggage seats, and it would have to go out in the corridor. This was irritating as a) we had asked and b) although I am sure almost everyone in Japan Is terribly law-abiding I did feel the need to go and stand over my suitcase at the stops, as otherwise it was out of my sight.
The trip was smooth and speedy, as expected, and totally unimpressive to my children, alas, as they have no real concept of how fast we’re actually going and how much time they would normally have to spend on a train to do that distance. The snacks & drinks trolley seems to have been downsized with COVID and only does coffee, no tea. I do find it mildly unnerving that we never seem to be out of towns/cities on the route.
We arrived at Kyoto Station - I remember being there in 2009, but my past and more recent mental images appear to be 180 degrees out from each other and I never quite got them in synch. Fortunately our hotel was super close as everyone was getting a little grumpy. Once again, I had told the kids there was a surprise about their hotel; when pressed, I said it was something to do with Pokemon. Shortly before I opened the door my daughter said that maybe there would be a giant Snorlax in their room…
There totally was. We were staying in the Pokemon room at the Mimaru apartment chain, with Pokemon plates and wall decals, and a massive Snorlax to cuddle. We settled in and argued over who would get the Snorlax first. My sister and family arrived and took the other Pokemon room (our parents stayed at an entirely Pokemon-free hotel on the other side of the station) and then we did some shopping and child-swapping. I headed out by myself for dinner because I wanted ramen, and conveniently the entire 10th floor of the station is ramen restaurants. Actually making a decision as to which one was much harder and I ended up with a shoyu one with vast amounts of spring onions in an attempt to eat more vegetables. Tasty but not my best ever.
Saturday
Foolishly I had not picked up anything for breakfast the night before. We went over to the station and (with some difficulty) tracked down a French bakery I’d seen the day before, where you could buy miniature danish pastries by weight. My daughter got increasingly grumpy the longer we took, and as she was wearing snow boots her disapproval manifested via very loud stomping.
Once we acquired pastries, we did some shopping; Uniqlo for fluffy warm jackets for everyone, Yodabashi for toys (including a whole wall of pokemon) and also for me to stare thoughtfully at suitcases, as at the rate my children were acquiring new stuffed toys I would be totally out of room before we left Kyoto. Also, if I bought a medium sized suitcase, I could send my large one back to Tokyo independently (this is a very organised service where you ship them between hotels etc) and avoid being publicly shamed on the Shinkansen again. Met up with my parents briefly and then returned to the hotel with assorted loot and combini snacks for lunch.
I then insisted that we actually visited a temple and took the kids to Kenninji Temple. Rather dismal weather and we kept trying to get in through the wrong entrance, but the temple was great, with a lot of fantastic art, including the Two Dragons ceiling and the Wind & Thunder god screens. I took a picture of my two looking meditatively at the well-raked garden as proof that they didn’t fight the whole time and bought everyone temple charms.
We were meeting my sister and her family at the Samurai & Ninja Museum with Experience at 6pm, so we wandered around Teramachi (enclosed shopping area with lots of cool little shops and a mini pig cafe that the kids stared at wistfully - fully booked and I was rather dubious about how well the animals were treated) looking at ceramics, stationery, clothes, etc, and got increasingly panicked text updates from my sister as the bus they were taking broke down and they tried to find a taxi. Fortunately they made it just after six.
The Samurai & Ninja Museum with Experience was great fun. We had a short lecture about the history of the samurai, for which my hazy recollections of playing Ghosts of Tsushima (for the Mongol invasion) and reading Kaze Hikaru (for the Bakumatsu) turned out to be surprisingly useful, looked at their very nice collection of samurai armour, and then they got us all to put on much less pretty but still reasonably convincing samurai outfits, grab weapons (“it’s up to you whether you let them have the metal ones,” said the guide, but both my two had already grabbed them) and pose in front of a suitable castle backdrop. We now have some fabulous action shots of my sister’s family and my family totally committing to the historical tradition of samurai intra-familial fighting (the guide, a Japanese guy with a very dry sense of humour, was approving - “lots of bodies. Great light. Like Rembrandt.”).
Then we took off the armour and went upstairs to the ninja shuriken throwing gallery, which was extremely exciting for everyone and I don’t know how no-one ended up pinned to a wall. My son got a bullseye and a free shuriken (the rest of us could earn them by writing reviews of the place online, a transactional approach that none the less works well for them) and everyone was quite sad to leave.
We ambled back down Teramachi and my sister got distracted by a fabric shop. I knew my two were going to lose it, but I really wanted to visit a bookshop, so I took my niece and my two to what we thought was a suitable manga shop but turned out to have an entire floor of boobs (in hindsight maybe being called Melon should have been a hint) so we went on to Maruzen, where my niece managed to find a reasonable selection of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure not yet translated into English, and I grabbed a volume of Cat + Gamer (only two volumes out in English so far) before my son totally melted down. I had to abandon my niece and stick everyone in a taxi; we went to my parents’ hotel (they weren’t at our one) for a quick catch-up and calm-down.
In the taxi I found an online review of Maruzen that said English language manga was in the second basement, so I directed my sister there and she sent me lots of photos, and, more importantly, bought me Hikaru no Go volumes 3,5, and 7. I did have a complete run of HnG but lent it to my nephew, who absolutely loves it and re-reads it constantly, so I had to acquire another run for me and those 3 volumes had been super elusive, with 3 showing up for ridiculous prices or not at all, so yay.
We walked back from my parents’ hotel via the station and had dinner at Tonkatsu KYK, because I really wanted tonkatsu; delicious pork, loved the pickles, but we had to queue for about 20 minutes to get in and my kids were totally over it. Staggered back to the hotel and collapsed.
Coming up; meeting
nnozomi, the manga museum, and a castle. And then another theme park.
