The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Five - Toji and Kinkakuji

It was another trip to Kyoto.

Amadeus was there trying to get his travel on, and I was looking to get out of nara so i decided i would hit one of the places i had missed during my first time through the country.

it is a golden temple that is located by a small lake. i had seen it years and years ago in a book in my high school japanese class, and i have wanted to see it since then. when i ended up in nara after a bulk of my nomadic traveling was over, i was like...wtf mate? why did i not see that cool golden building?

turns out it was in kyoto, and it was not recommended to me as a "must see" place by the tourist office i visited when i first got there. just goes to show you that when youre trying to have a real foreign adventure, not like one of the stupid fake ones where you spend all your time in western style hotels and eating at restaurants with american style food, you never trust the tourist office.

i guess tourist offices are decent to a certain extent, but the problem is that theyre full of tourists. cities like kyoto, tokyo, hiroshima and osaka are chock full of them. for the most part, about 25% of the travelers are decent, well-rounded travelers looking for a unique cultural experience, a chance to dip their feet into a pool of learning and developing symbiotic and positive relations with people all over the world, but the rest, oh friends, the rest are different. the rest of them are crazy european lesbians with fanny packs looking for a two week escape from reality in their dark, cold and oppressive eastern european countries, or college party boys looking to score with lots of japanese chicks all over the country. i know, ive seen it.

since i havent come anywhere close to japanese chick hook ups, and im not a lesbian and dont own a fanny pack, hopefully i dont fall into either of those categories.

so me and amadeus start at a flea market located at what was described to us as being the tallest pagoda on the entire country.

you have to remember that kyoto is a city full of amazing ancient wonders. when america was firebombing the crap out of this country, they decided to spare most of the kansai area, including nara. the bombs took out a good part of osaka though, which isnt too far away. stuff like this pagoda still remain here, untouched by the war.

we looked around the flea market area, which reminded me of good old ladonia in alabama, the best flea market ive seen in the columbus georgia area. it had food vendors, plenty of old junk, some crazy people, and a few rare and marvelous finds. one time at the ladonia flea market, i bought a pair of ray-ban sunglasses for a dollar. can you believe that? a freaking dollar.

i ate some of my favorite japanese foods, taiyaki and kakigoori, and then me and amadeus walked out of the temple area and saw a guy playing a shamisen on a street corner like a madman. he was so incredible, ive never seen a street performer like it.

btw in this picture, the thing hanging from my mouth is NOT a cigarette, it is a kakigoori straw and the cup i am holding, even though it is a goblet, does NOT contain alcohol, although it did once help the precious iciness of kakigoori.

and then we were on to kinkakuji, the golden temple. we took a good long bus ride there and made our way towards the temple. it was very beautiful.

i couldnt tell of the kids there speaking spanish and japanese were calling the temple "gorudo", which is the word for gold in the japanese version of english, or if they were calling me "gordo", the spanish word for fat. i was happy with either one of the uses of the word. i just know one of the chicks kept looking at me and smiling and laughing. i didnt like her though. she was wearing too much make up and looked like a latina miss piggy. bless her heart.


so we checked that area out for a while, ran into some annoying american high school kids, and then me and amadeus had some ice cream goodness. we made our way back to kyoto station and lamented the loss of amadeus' two lost australian loves and my future with them staying at the nara tree guest house the next day.

more havoc to come.

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Four - Hasedera and Omiwa

My sincere apologies to the 60c60d faithful out there for neglecting updates for the last ten days. Just to let you know, I am still alive and so is 60c60d. while i am still lodging in nara, i still get out to see the surrounding areas and make more havoc.

Amadeus is still chilling around town, so we reckon it might be a good idea to go out and tour one of the working temples around the area.

But as it turns out, it isnt even close at all. It takes us about an hour by train to get there. We were excited though, cause it was decent to get out of nara for a while and check out some more sites.

The road to hasedera was long and hot and sweaty. Its built into the side of a mountain range, so you gotta walk all the way there from the station, it was a long and grueling 20 minutes trip, and by the end of it, we were thanking our lucky stars that we had packed our shamwow to catch all the sweat from our perspirating brows.

The temple was cool, there were monks wandering around, driving in cars and smoking cigarettes, the kind of stuff i hadnt pictured monks doing. The times they are a changin though.


I got some decent pictures by this long stairway. It turns out japanese folks dont like the number 4, so as opposed to building the stairs with 400 steps, they only made 399. good news for us. we made it to the top of the stairs to the temple area, which had lots of these cool cloth things hanging on the outer area of the temple. the inside was full of all these gold statues. me and amadeus lit some candles and said a couple little prayers there, cause seriously, i know gods already got my back, but nothing wrong with getting on buddhas side too.

we took some adventurous and contemplative shots off the side of this veranda like place in front of the temple.

we wanted to go inside and get a closer look at some of the stuff, but they were charging like 1000yen to get into the inner areas of the temple, plus the monk got mad at me for wearing shoes on his little wooden area where i reckon you were supposed to change your shoes. psh, seriously gimme a break. i thought you were supposed to stand on the wood while you changed, but i guess i was wrong, and i was yelled at by a monk.

me and amadeus walked away, feeling like we had been wronged and then talked crap about the monk behind his back for about five minutes until we felt better about the whole situation.

we went on down a path that was covered in all these old graveyards for former priests and monks. for some reason, sometimes people put things like sake or coke cans on top of the markers, i guess to make an offering to the dead or something. anyway, amadeus ended up stealing a can of something before he knew it was meant to be there for a reason, and now he is haunted eternally by the spirit of a dead priest.

also, during the day, i picked up a bamboo stick, and became a spiritual leader called bura-dashi. some of my teachings include avoiding the wearing of surfer clothing, the everyday eating of hamburgers and hotdogs, and abstinence from listening to music classified under the genre "indie"


bura-dashi believes in an existence of mostly eating, sleeping, and drinking lots of coke zero. its appropriate for male followers of bura-dashi to be afraid of females, but only the ones they like.

your devotion to bura-dashi will lead to a lifetime of happiness and harmony with those around you.

on the way back to nara, amadeus and the newly dicovered priest within brandon, bura-dashi, stopped by another temple in omiwa. they enjoyed their time there greatly and bura-dashi was greatly impressed with the beauty of the "shrine maids" there.

but seriously, they had the coolest outfits i had ever seen.