Confessions of a Solo Tourist

I have a confession to make. I’m not very good at traveling by myself. I pretend. I ‘front’ as my homies in the hood would say; but in reality, it’s really not something that I’m very comfortable at doing. I’ve yet to find that balance between planning ahead and being spontaneous. In fact, I often feel like I come up on the wrong side of the argument between the two. Despite this somewhat ominous preface, however, my trip to Kyoto this past week was a great deal of fun.

I left home early Tuesday morning with a couple changes of clothes and my toothbrush and hopped a bus, then streetcar to Kumamoto Station where I started my journey to the old capital of Japan, Kyoto. And when I say ‘old’, I mean ancient. Kyoto was founded in the 8th century, designed specifically to be the seat of the Japanese imperial court. It remained the capital of Japan until the 19th century when it was moved to Tokyo. In fact, there is some – a very little – dispute that the move of the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo was ever officially documented, making Kyoto the official capital of Japan still. Since the Emperor and the Diet reside in Tokyo, however, lack of official documentation seems to me to be a futile argument.

But back to me. I had been very anxious about buying my tickets, practicing my Japanese constantly, and I am proud to say that I delivered my lines well and was even able to understand and answer the one question put to me in Japanese. I had no problems at all. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the poor girl I was buying the tickets from. She went through the transaction twice before having to void them both at the very end before finally getting it right on the third try. We got through it, though, and I caught the 9:30 train to Harata / Fukuoka where I got the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto.

To me, the term ‘bullet train’ has always called to mind the image of fields and seas whizzing by too fast to see any definition. It’s a completely unrealistic image, of course. While it does travel extraordinarily fast – almost 200 miles an hour - I could still see individuals working in the fields and waves in the sea. That is, of course, when we weren’t traveling through tunnels, which was about 70% of the time.

Kyoto is located in the central part of Honshu, the main and largest island of Japan. My train there passed through the well-known cities of Osaka, Kobe, and Hiroshima and was bound for Tokyo, which would only have been another couple hours past Kyoto.

I arrived in Kyoto at 2 pm, though it was another hour before I got to the hostel because of a misunderstanding which left me riding the bus for quite a while. I finally found the hostel, however, and checked in. And by this point, I was starving. I hadn’t had anything since some toast and jam earlier in the morning, so I dropped off my bags and walked into the very near Gion district to find a place to eat.

To anyone who has seen Memoirs of a Geisha, Gion would look very familiar to you. Or it would, if the film hadn’t used a set in L.A. to stand-in for Japan’s most famous geisha district where much of the story takes place. Though the numbers of geisha have declined considerably, you can still see women in full geisha regalia walking down the street in the evening. I will admit, however, that while I saw many women in the traditional clothing and elaborate hairstyles of a geisha, I never saw one with the makeup and all.

Today the Gion district is a great place to see some of the original style buildings and architecture. Tea houses dot the streets where business men can go and be served tea and cocktails and entertained by traditional geisha singing and dancing. As I am not a business man and I don’t have a lot of money - to gain entrance to one of these exclusive houses is very expensive - this was one Kyoto attraction I had to miss.

After enjoying a wonderful dinner of Okayodon (chicken and egg cooked over rice) in a small traditional Japanese restaurant in Gion, I walked to the nearby Yasaka Shrine. Yasaka Shrine was originally built in 656 AD and is the site of arguably the most famous festival in Japan, Gion Matsuri, which takes place the entire month of July and which I just missed. It is a beautiful shrine, however, with even more beautiful gardens and I enjoyed it tremendously.

After wandering around for a while, taking tons of pictures, I walked back through a long street of shops in Gion to my hostel. For the first, but not the last time of my trip, it had started to rain and I got back to the hostel just as the downpour began in earnest.

With the rain coming down hard on the streets and the fact that I was a little tired from traveling all day, I settled in for the night. I was staying in a dorm style room with eight beds. The first night grouped me with: a young, Irish couple that were spending the summer in Beijing on a school trip and were traveling in Japan for a week, a couple of French girls that if spoke English, certainly weren’t going to speak to anyone other than the other, a guy from New York interning at an engineering firm in Tokyo over the summer, and guy from St. Joe, Missouri studying Japanese at an international language school in Kyoto for a few months. I was very relieved to hear that he was going to school at Missouri State University and held Missouri in as much contempt as I do.

We got to know each other a little and I quizzed the Robert, guy from Missouri, about what I should see and do in Kyoto since he’d been there for over a month. I got a lot of good advice from the others regarding the bus system and how to read the bus map, which would be a vast help in the coming days. I read for a while and made plans for the next day and finally hit the sheets around midnight.

And so ends my first half-day of my Kyoto adventure. Stay tuned for the rest of my escapades coming soon (hopefully).

- Jenny