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So if you didn't know I spent the last week in Japan. Ostensibly I was there for a friend's wedding in Kyoto, but since that was only going to be one day and I didn't expect she'd have any free time my trip was mostly about me and doing the things I wanted to do.
Here's a rundown of the first 4 days from my 8 day trip.
So I leave San Francisco in the middle of the day. The plane is actually early into Kansai International (in Osaka) by an hour or so and the whole flight was actually not that bad. At the train station that will take me from the airport to Kyoto I bump into another wedding guest from America who was totally lost and couldn't speak a word of Japanese and since we were staying in the same building we teamed up for the day.
The train ride was very nice. I should mention that in light of the disaster a lot of places around Japan seemed to be cutting back on their electricity usage so a lot of things that should have air conditioned weren't. And when it's 34° with something like 70% humidity and you're from coastal, foggy California it feels like you're walking through hell itself. So getting on a train with the air running was beautiful. It was evening and I since I'd been awake for a long time I slept most of the hour or so to Kyoto.
I'd never been to Kyoto, but I had the directions to the place we were staying and even though the main Kyoto station is a maze of trains, subways, escalators, elevators, and underground shopping arcades I had little trouble getting us to the right subway stop. Once there I check the maps that these stations all have for our apartment I find that... I can't find it. The nice station attendant gets a map of the city and tells us that we're at the wrong stop and suggests we go up anyway and get a taxi since it wouldn't really cost any more than subwaying it back.
So that's what we do. Unfortunately Kyoto is arranged differently than most places in Japan. Or at least the places I've been. They have everything arranged into 'chou' which are like neighborhoods, and that's how I had my directions. In Kyoto they use street names because unlike everywhere else in Japan they actually name their streets. Our driver gets really upset that we have crappy directions and pulls over to ask a total stranger to help. After about 45 minutes of all this nonsense this complete and total stranger offers to drive us halfway across the city to the outskirts of town to the only place we know we can find someone who has the actual address info we need. That's the kind of thing which makes Japan the best place on Earth.
So we do that, the two of us crammed in the back of this stranger's tiny van, and only about halfway through this drive does it occur to me that I'm lost in a foreign country being driven to what could be anyway in the back of a stranger's van. But we weren't robbed, raped, or murdered because, like I said, Japan is the best place on Earth. We get to the place the wedding is going to be held and the wedding planner gets a different taxi service to take us to our apartment.
And do you want to know where that apartment was? About 100 meters away from where the taxi left us with this total stranger. By this time it's past 9:00 and I've been awake for over 24 hours so I crash.
And that was my welcome to Kyoto.
My first real day in Japan I spent in Kyoto. For this trip I'd saved a lot of money because I fully expected I would see a lot of things I would want to buy and I didn't want to leave regretting not getting something. So after figuring out where all the different subway lines went I decided the best thing to do was go right to the main station since there is always a lot of shopping around big stations.
The places I had most wanted to check out were clothing and book stores and I found them all over the place, especially clothing stores. You would not believe how many different ones they have, from cheap to way expensive, and all over the style spectrum. The underground arcades are covered in them and it just makes your heart beat faster to see all the choices you have. There was just one itsy bitsy problem for me: sizes.
Japanese people are tiny. That's a lie. Lots of them are and lots of them aren't, but like all clothing stores everywhere they assume you're small. Every store I went to had clothing in two sizes: M and L. And these were Japanese M and L so they were still way too small for me. I consoled myself at a bakery that had some tasty, tasty matcha tea flavored pastries and while I was eating a saw a 4-floor shopping mall-building thing across the way and made that my next destination.
In addition to all the clothing stores this area had a super big book store, a Toys-R-Us, and a pet shop. Outside the book store they had on display a new book on the animals left behind in the disaster area of the Tsunami. There were pictures of cats and dogs and other animals living among the mud and hollow shells of buildings. It was the first thing I'd seen there that directly referenced the disaster and since everything else was so normal it was a bit of a shock to see this.
All in all I did a lot of walking around in the hot, nasty weather this day and bought a fair amount of things, mostly socks and manga, including the first 4 books of Aoi Hana and Hourou Musuko since that's all the stores I went to had. I also picked up some nice blisters on my toes.
Japanese weddings are something else. Everywhere there are ads for them and magazines specializing in them. You hire an organizer and a place and they do everything for you. They help you get a dress, and then another dress for you to change into later on in the reception, and then another. And another. I've heard of weddings where the bride had 6 dresses, but my friend said that the extra dresses cost as much to rent as the main wedding dress does to buy so she only went with one dress change.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Since the wedding was not until the evening I spent part of the morning seeing an old castle which was near where I was staying and the other part getting my hair cut. The castle was, well, it was old, and there wasn't much of it to actually see. It wasn't very big or detailed. It was still pretty interesting though and it got me out of the sun.
For my hair cut I decided to go with something kind of short. I haven't had hair that hasn't gone at least to my shoulders for a long time so I was a little scared, but the very patient hairdresser helped me find something good in one of those hair magazines they have hundreds of. She did an amazing job, too, which I expected because you just can't cut hair and stay in business unless you're super talented.
So, back to the wedding. They have entire buildings set up for weddings all over the place. This had a chapel-like area with glass walls and a pool of water with light shining into it to get that light-reflecting-off-water effect. I'm not normally a fan of weddings, but this one was amazing. The groom entered in his white suit, a little embarrassed, then the bride and everything went so smoothly that I couldn't dislike anything. The people making everything go so well were so professional I felt like I was at a 5-star hotel.
The food was super delicious, the groom threw broccoli after the bride threw the bouquet, and the bride made a speech to the man who was giving her away and had essentially been her surrogate father and mentor for most of her life that made all of us cry. I'm even getting a little misty-eyed remembering it.
The whole wedding and reception only lasted about 3 hours but I felt like I'd been there the whole day because of how much they'd packed into those 3 hours. They even had a professional looking thank you video montage to the guests comprised of video of... us guests, shot up to an hour before they showed it to it. That they could do all that blew my mind.
If I ever get married I want it to be in Japan in one of these places.
Yes, here is where I actually bring up the real guilty pleasure of mine.
So I went to Osaka this day to a big shopping area. I didn't really know what it would look like or what I would find there, but I had the names and addresses of several stores I wanted to look into.
After training in to Osaka I subwayed to this shopping area and found myself in a large covered arcade that, I swear, was several miles long. At least it felt like it was that big. It had everything: hotels, pachinko parlors, game centers, restaurants, karaoke bars, fashion boutiques, bookstores, nail care centers, underwear shops, drugstores, grocery stores, stores that sold only cigarette lighters, and anything you could imagine, including *drum roll* a store where I got these:
If you're counting that's 8 separate outfits and some other accessories and other pieces, which there are more, but I haven't got pictures of them. To be honest, if I'd had more money and space in my luggage I would have bought even more. In my previous days' shopping I'd also picked up some issues of Gothic & Lolita Bible and they had some listings for other stores in the area where I could get even more of these dresses and accessories. The sad thing about that was that I was already so burdened carrying these, it was raining, and nothing in the area was labeled so I didn't know where to find any of the other places.
I obviously wasn't allowed to try any of these on before buying them so I had to trust that they would fit. Thankfully, most of them did. The solid black on is a little squarish on me and it's my least favorite. The white blouse on the one with the bonnet-y hood is pretty tight on me, too, but I can still manage into it and it looks good. There were a lot in the store that I'd have liked to get, some with more details and patterns that I really liked, but they didn't have any in my size. I'm still pretty thrilled I could find all that I did. The fact that they had anything at all in a 2L size (omg, I know their sizes are smaller but that made me feel huge D: ) was better than I'd hoped for after all my failures normal clothing stores.
I gotta admit got my hopes up a little with the pink one. It reminded me of one of the outfits from Cardcaptor Sakura when I saw it. This one, actually:
But as you can see they colors are reversed and they aren't all that close after all. Still, I'm very happy with it and everything I got. Finding this store was one of the highlights of this trip and, really, of this whole year. I was quite a bit scared to go in in the first place and especially when I saw how crowded it was and got looks from some of the other customers, but the old lady who seemed to run the store and the lolita girls working there were really helpful and didn't make me feel out of place. I'm really glad I was able to muster up the courage.
And now you know my big guilty pleasure. ^_^;
I have 4 more days of my trip I haven't chronicled yet, but unfortunately they won't contain any more big revelations, although I might work up the courage to actually post pictures of myself. But probably not.
Here's a rundown of the first 4 days from my 8 day trip.
Day 1, Thursday: The Long Lost Apartment
So I leave San Francisco in the middle of the day. The plane is actually early into Kansai International (in Osaka) by an hour or so and the whole flight was actually not that bad. At the train station that will take me from the airport to Kyoto I bump into another wedding guest from America who was totally lost and couldn't speak a word of Japanese and since we were staying in the same building we teamed up for the day.
The train ride was very nice. I should mention that in light of the disaster a lot of places around Japan seemed to be cutting back on their electricity usage so a lot of things that should have air conditioned weren't. And when it's 34° with something like 70% humidity and you're from coastal, foggy California it feels like you're walking through hell itself. So getting on a train with the air running was beautiful. It was evening and I since I'd been awake for a long time I slept most of the hour or so to Kyoto.
I'd never been to Kyoto, but I had the directions to the place we were staying and even though the main Kyoto station is a maze of trains, subways, escalators, elevators, and underground shopping arcades I had little trouble getting us to the right subway stop. Once there I check the maps that these stations all have for our apartment I find that... I can't find it. The nice station attendant gets a map of the city and tells us that we're at the wrong stop and suggests we go up anyway and get a taxi since it wouldn't really cost any more than subwaying it back.
So that's what we do. Unfortunately Kyoto is arranged differently than most places in Japan. Or at least the places I've been. They have everything arranged into 'chou' which are like neighborhoods, and that's how I had my directions. In Kyoto they use street names because unlike everywhere else in Japan they actually name their streets. Our driver gets really upset that we have crappy directions and pulls over to ask a total stranger to help. After about 45 minutes of all this nonsense this complete and total stranger offers to drive us halfway across the city to the outskirts of town to the only place we know we can find someone who has the actual address info we need. That's the kind of thing which makes Japan the best place on Earth.
So we do that, the two of us crammed in the back of this stranger's tiny van, and only about halfway through this drive does it occur to me that I'm lost in a foreign country being driven to what could be anyway in the back of a stranger's van. But we weren't robbed, raped, or murdered because, like I said, Japan is the best place on Earth. We get to the place the wedding is going to be held and the wedding planner gets a different taxi service to take us to our apartment.
And do you want to know where that apartment was? About 100 meters away from where the taxi left us with this total stranger. By this time it's past 9:00 and I've been awake for over 24 hours so I crash.
And that was my welcome to Kyoto.
Day 2, Friday: Kyoto Shopping Extravaganza
My first real day in Japan I spent in Kyoto. For this trip I'd saved a lot of money because I fully expected I would see a lot of things I would want to buy and I didn't want to leave regretting not getting something. So after figuring out where all the different subway lines went I decided the best thing to do was go right to the main station since there is always a lot of shopping around big stations.
The places I had most wanted to check out were clothing and book stores and I found them all over the place, especially clothing stores. You would not believe how many different ones they have, from cheap to way expensive, and all over the style spectrum. The underground arcades are covered in them and it just makes your heart beat faster to see all the choices you have. There was just one itsy bitsy problem for me: sizes.
Japanese people are tiny. That's a lie. Lots of them are and lots of them aren't, but like all clothing stores everywhere they assume you're small. Every store I went to had clothing in two sizes: M and L. And these were Japanese M and L so they were still way too small for me. I consoled myself at a bakery that had some tasty, tasty matcha tea flavored pastries and while I was eating a saw a 4-floor shopping mall-building thing across the way and made that my next destination.
In addition to all the clothing stores this area had a super big book store, a Toys-R-Us, and a pet shop. Outside the book store they had on display a new book on the animals left behind in the disaster area of the Tsunami. There were pictures of cats and dogs and other animals living among the mud and hollow shells of buildings. It was the first thing I'd seen there that directly referenced the disaster and since everything else was so normal it was a bit of a shock to see this.
All in all I did a lot of walking around in the hot, nasty weather this day and bought a fair amount of things, mostly socks and manga, including the first 4 books of Aoi Hana and Hourou Musuko since that's all the stores I went to had. I also picked up some nice blisters on my toes.
Day 3, Saturday: Wedding Day
Japanese weddings are something else. Everywhere there are ads for them and magazines specializing in them. You hire an organizer and a place and they do everything for you. They help you get a dress, and then another dress for you to change into later on in the reception, and then another. And another. I've heard of weddings where the bride had 6 dresses, but my friend said that the extra dresses cost as much to rent as the main wedding dress does to buy so she only went with one dress change.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Since the wedding was not until the evening I spent part of the morning seeing an old castle which was near where I was staying and the other part getting my hair cut. The castle was, well, it was old, and there wasn't much of it to actually see. It wasn't very big or detailed. It was still pretty interesting though and it got me out of the sun.
For my hair cut I decided to go with something kind of short. I haven't had hair that hasn't gone at least to my shoulders for a long time so I was a little scared, but the very patient hairdresser helped me find something good in one of those hair magazines they have hundreds of. She did an amazing job, too, which I expected because you just can't cut hair and stay in business unless you're super talented.
So, back to the wedding. They have entire buildings set up for weddings all over the place. This had a chapel-like area with glass walls and a pool of water with light shining into it to get that light-reflecting-off-water effect. I'm not normally a fan of weddings, but this one was amazing. The groom entered in his white suit, a little embarrassed, then the bride and everything went so smoothly that I couldn't dislike anything. The people making everything go so well were so professional I felt like I was at a 5-star hotel.
The food was super delicious, the groom threw broccoli after the bride threw the bouquet, and the bride made a speech to the man who was giving her away and had essentially been her surrogate father and mentor for most of her life that made all of us cry. I'm even getting a little misty-eyed remembering it.
The whole wedding and reception only lasted about 3 hours but I felt like I'd been there the whole day because of how much they'd packed into those 3 hours. They even had a professional looking thank you video montage to the guests comprised of video of... us guests, shot up to an hour before they showed it to it. That they could do all that blew my mind.
If I ever get married I want it to be in Japan in one of these places.
Day 4, Sunday: Osaka and the Guilty Pleasure
Yes, here is where I actually bring up the real guilty pleasure of mine.
So I went to Osaka this day to a big shopping area. I didn't really know what it would look like or what I would find there, but I had the names and addresses of several stores I wanted to look into.
After training in to Osaka I subwayed to this shopping area and found myself in a large covered arcade that, I swear, was several miles long. At least it felt like it was that big. It had everything: hotels, pachinko parlors, game centers, restaurants, karaoke bars, fashion boutiques, bookstores, nail care centers, underwear shops, drugstores, grocery stores, stores that sold only cigarette lighters, and anything you could imagine, including *drum roll* a store where I got these:
If you're counting that's 8 separate outfits and some other accessories and other pieces, which there are more, but I haven't got pictures of them. To be honest, if I'd had more money and space in my luggage I would have bought even more. In my previous days' shopping I'd also picked up some issues of Gothic & Lolita Bible and they had some listings for other stores in the area where I could get even more of these dresses and accessories. The sad thing about that was that I was already so burdened carrying these, it was raining, and nothing in the area was labeled so I didn't know where to find any of the other places.
I obviously wasn't allowed to try any of these on before buying them so I had to trust that they would fit. Thankfully, most of them did. The solid black on is a little squarish on me and it's my least favorite. The white blouse on the one with the bonnet-y hood is pretty tight on me, too, but I can still manage into it and it looks good. There were a lot in the store that I'd have liked to get, some with more details and patterns that I really liked, but they didn't have any in my size. I'm still pretty thrilled I could find all that I did. The fact that they had anything at all in a 2L size (omg, I know their sizes are smaller but that made me feel huge D: ) was better than I'd hoped for after all my failures normal clothing stores.
I gotta admit got my hopes up a little with the pink one. It reminded me of one of the outfits from Cardcaptor Sakura when I saw it. This one, actually:
But as you can see they colors are reversed and they aren't all that close after all. Still, I'm very happy with it and everything I got. Finding this store was one of the highlights of this trip and, really, of this whole year. I was quite a bit scared to go in in the first place and especially when I saw how crowded it was and got looks from some of the other customers, but the old lady who seemed to run the store and the lolita girls working there were really helpful and didn't make me feel out of place. I'm really glad I was able to muster up the courage.
And now you know my big guilty pleasure. ^_^;
I have 4 more days of my trip I haven't chronicled yet, but unfortunately they won't contain any more big revelations, although I might work up the courage to actually post pictures of myself. But probably not.
