The Hairless One visited us from time to time. He was larger than us. He challenged no one, and would not be challenged. He simply sat among us, silent and immobile as the mountain rocks.


A monkey swimming.


A baby monkey wrapped around a pool. This is a split second after it noticed me. It was even cuter when it didn't see me.


This is near the main monkey grounds.


Monkeys are friends!


So that's what he does on the other 364 days of the year...


Yes, random kid in the Tokyo Metropolitan Gov't Building - it is good to have a friend. Multiple ones, in fact.

Sorry I haven:t updated. Temple stay was fine, Monkey park was great. Hiroshima was depressing. Rushing around Kyoto buying last minute souveniers was tiring. Someday, I:ll look up how to spell souveniers.

Since I:ll have much more time tommorrow, I:ll just do a final update then, from the comfort of my apartment. I took over 1000 pictures. I will make a super site, full of commentary, pictures, and such. I:ll send that link out once it:s created.

I:m leaving at 1PM Saturday. I:m landing in Detroit at 12:00 PM Saturday. That:s difficult to think about, and kind of weird.

First thing I:m gonna do once I get back and make sure my apartment hasn:t been looted? Make a hamburger. I miss them.

Need to go get stuff ready and packed for tommorrow.

THe monkey park was everything i hoped for and more.


I will post stuff on it as soon as I can. I even got videos!! Oh, man. Anyway, the post probably not for a couple days, though, unless they have internet at the temple i:m staying at tommorrow (it:s gonna take some time to get to, so much of the tommorrow will be spent traveling. Tokyo->Osaka->Koya-san temple complex->temple. Appx 5-6 hours). Anyway, i:ll update from Osaka once I get back.

Photo Dump Kyoto / Tokyo

The last morning of my stay in Kyoto, I went to Fushimi Inari, a shrine on the outskirts of the city. The fox is considered the messenger of Inari, the god of cereal grains.


Paths climbed up the mountain, through hundreds of torii.


I did a double take when I saw this branching. It seemed slightly like an optical illusion to me.


Dragons are associated with water in the East, so many of them served as fountains. Shinto Shrines had basins in front of them for worshipers to wash hands and drink before entering.


because there are so many Shrines and temples in Kyoto, you:ll often come across Torii in the middle of city streets, with the temple several blocks away. These are usually considered the :true: entrances to the temples.


A view of Kyoto from the city park.


Kinkaku-ji temple is a major tourist attraction. It:s quite pretty, of course, but I had seen better temples grounds. Also, being so well known, it was packed. By the number of people, you could see why the temple was layered in gold...



Welcome to Kinkaku-ji. Do you want to buy something?

(Admittedly, that:s a bit unfair to pick on Kinkaku-ji... every major temple and shrine I visited had some buildings converted to gift shops/ gift shop rooms. The reason why I especially noticed this in Kinkaku-ji was because the grounds consisted of the temple, a very small park, and the shops area. I saw better temples without paying an admission price)

Tokyo

As stated in the last post, the Tokyo Museum had many impressive articles. I really think my sister would:ve liked it, because they had a special exhibit on some Buddhist works from a particular period that I can:t recall right now. Lacking the fundamental knowledge necessary to fully appreciate it, I could only see them as works of art. They were still quite nice, though. Unfortunately, photos of that area weren:t allowed.


Anyway, this is the masamune sword. Turns out the picture quality, as suspected, sucked. The sword itself is a work of art, and my favorite of the day.


Luckily, the name card came out clearly *sigh*


After leaving the museum, I found a nice surprise. The lanes of the park were packed with people admiring the cherry blossoms.


This is a picture of the areas they set aside with tarps and tables for family picnics.


It was windy, so the cherry blossoms were slowly falling off the trees. I don:t think you can tell in any of the pictures, though.


Me and some cherry trees.


After the Meiji Restoration, a group of Samurai angry at the gov:t for taking away their powers and adopting the ways of the west made their last stand at Ueno Hill. They were crushed by the gov:t forces. A few years later, the survivors petitioned the gov:t to build a memorial to the fallen. This is it.

I then went to Asakusa, another part of Tokyo. I had planned to attach myself to a tour, but, like I stated, I had just missed it. Anyway...


The street to Senso-ji was packed with people, with little shops lining the road. Ahhh. Also, the interior of the temple was so packed, that people on the outskirts of the donation area had to throw their coins in.

I then tried to look around some of the more modern parts of the city. I went into a computer / game store.


So close, and yet so so far... in the end, the language barrier was too great... (Final Fantasy 12, just released in Japan. I really want to play it, but will have to wait for the US release, which won:t happen for a few months... or half a year). Oh, something odd... Games and DVDs cost more here. around 35 dollars for a DVD, and 70 or so for games. Action Figures? Crazy high.

Oh, something cool: While wandering around Kyoto, I found a little shop with many small action figures. So... I probably have a near complete set of Final Fantasy 6 keychains now. Wheee!! And for much less than I would:ve paid on ebay.

I think I:m going to go stalk the squaresoft offices now. Tommorrow I shall venture forth to see the monkeys, the day after tommorrow I:ll go sleep at a temple on a mountaintop, and after that I:ll probably head back to Osaka for a couple of days to wrap up shopping and sightseeing in Kyoto (there were some places in both Osaka and Kyoto that I wanted to see and wasn:t able to. Also, Kyoto had the best shopping, in my opinion).

Tokyo has far too many other human beings in it for my taste. Give me moss covered temples and abandoned shrines over a megalopolis any day of the week.

However, today I got to see a real Masamune blade. That made this part of the trip worth it. Unfortunately, I was looking through the pictures I took at the Tokyo National Museum today, and many of them are probably a bit out of focus. My camera has this problem that, when the flash isn:t used, quality goes down. I:m not really sure how to fix this, and there were signs all over the place indicating that we couldn:t use flash photography in the museum. Anyway, it was worth seeing regardless. The rest of their sword collection was quite wonderful, as was the naginata they had.

I also accidently stumpled onto a massive cherry blossom viewing party. I have pictures of that that I will upload when I can. Wow. I mean, I can see why they make special outings for it. It was windy today, and the blossoms fell like a light snow. Anyway, the main throughfare of the park near the museum is flanked by cherry trees. Today, underneath all the trees, the people had laid down tarps and were having picnics. It:s a pretty big event. They had even brought out tables!

My Lonely Planet guidebook has been wrong on two things that slightly screwed me up. (1) There is no Virtual Reality gaming center in the Sony Building, much to my dismay. It was probably a temporary exhibition. And, (2), the free guides for Asakusa leave at 2 PM, not 3PM, as my book stated. Arrive at 2:10, and you:ll just miss them.

It turns out that wasn:t such a bad thing; the area got on my nerves pretty quickly. There:s a huge Shinto shrine in Asakusa. That:s one of the main attractions of the area. But, there were sooo many people there. . It really was kind of annoying, especially since not two days ago I was trekking through Shinto shrines in near silence. And, it being a city, not a few blocks from the Shrine was an :adult entertainment: shop (and they don:t censor their ads here, even ads on the street. Or at least, not censor in the way that the US thinks of it.) Is nothing sacred? *sigh* The whole atmosphere: jostling the crowds, the fact that in between the entry Torii and the shrine itself was a street filled with souvenier shops, the seedy places not 5 minutes walk away.... To me, it definitely did not feel like any sort of sacred ground.

Anyway, i:ll try to find a real internet bar soon to upload some pictures. I:ll be going to see the monkeys tommorrow or the next day. I need to make some lodging reservations for the last few days of the trip soon. Eep, less than a week left.