This Is A Lake - A travel blog

So I had to do the whole bus/cable car/train combination again, and it felt decidedly longer this time around. Eventually I arrived in Namba Station at about noon. I am so proud of the prescience I showed when I booked the Dotonbori Hotel . I had a vision that by this point in the trip I would have neither the energy nor the will to look for a place in a map, or take several subways, so I looked for something that was so close to the station that I could just throw my bags out of the train doors and into my room. And indeed, this hotel is in Dotonbori street, which itself is two blocks from Namba Station, so already that's my transport and the main sightseeing spot all together in one place. It's a pretty nice hotel, too -wifi and LAN, breakfast included, Western style, neko-map of the city, and for those staying longer they have free bike rental. If you check out their website -yes, the front really does look like that! So I dropped off my stuff, rested a little bit, t

Guys! Guys! I forgot to write about this. I found a place that serves REAL hot chocolate in Japan. It was called Café Ciao Presso and it was in Nara Station. Eat your heart out, Paris (that's the second time I use that sentence in this blog). I assume because it was in a station that it must be a chain, but I haven't seen any other since :( Kazuyo had warned me in advance that in Osaka people stand on the right side of escalators, like in London, whereas in Tokyo and Kyoto they stand on the left. This often leads to the humorous conclusion that there must be a frontier somewhere, a fabled escalator that marks the territories of right-standing and left-standing. Well, I found it!! I saw an escalator in Shin-Osaka station where the people going down stood on the left and the people going up stood on the right. That must be it! Foreign travellers in Japan quickly learn that our credit cards only work on 7-11 and Post Office ATMs, which requires advance planning to have cash rea

Last night I took Ekoin's night-time tour of Okunoin, Koya-san's famous cemetery and Unesco World Heritage Site. It was a good idea to leave my own visit to the cemetery until after taking the tour, as I later had a better idea of the history of the place as I walked on my own. It was freezing, of course, but I had thrown on everything I had, so it wasn't so bad. Learning about the history of the place, and about Kobo Daishi, one of the founding fathers of Japanese Buddhism (and also a master calligrapher and poet, we were told), who is believed to still be meditating in his cave, since he locked himself in it in the 9th century. The monks still carry breakfast and lunch to his cave every day. Our guide combined explanations of Okunoin's and Koyasan's history along with a brief summary of the tenets of esoteric Buddhism, which really helped to put some of the sights in context. It was a moonless night, it was pitch black, and in the dimly lit path I suddenly u

So! Time to travel! I woke up early this morning to bid farewell to Kyoto, say goodbye to Liza and begin the journey to Mt. Koya (or Koya-san in Japanese). Koya is a small sacred town, 820 m high in the mountains, notable for being in essence the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism. I was dreading the journey, in a way, because of all the exchanges you have to make to get from Kyoto to Koya: first you take a shinkansen to Osaka, then the subway to Nanba, then a train to the base of the mountain, then a cable car to Koya, then a bus to wherever it is you're staying. However, it turned out to be much better than it reads on paper. The shinkansen ride to Osaka takes barely 15 minutes, and although the train is the longest part of the journey clocking in at about an hour and a half, the train-cable car-bus combination went as smooth as it gets: although they aren't very frequent, they are timed to coincide with each other so the cable car will be waiting for you when you get of

Today was my last day in Kyoto, so it's been pretty much a day of tying up loose ends. On the one hand, I felt pretty satisfied of having seen the most important landmarks, and on the other, I was a bit tired of temple-hopping (especially as I'm leaving tomorrow to stay at a temple), so I decided that any temples that I have left to see here will have to wait until my next visit. I had a very slow morning, just catching up on some sleep, blogging about yesterday, and so on, and then left for Arashiyama to see the Bamboo Grove. I had been warned that it was a second-tier visit, and it's true; it's waaay too far from the centre to warrant the trip. The bamboos are beautiful, and it does get a bit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at points, but unlike the Philosopher's Path, it doesn't really have anything to spark your interest as you walk along. Riding the train back, I noticed it stopped near Myoshinji, a big temple complex I had heard about, so I got off

Yesterday was Nara day! We headed to Nara from Kyoto first thing in the morning, where we met with Liza's friend, Yoko, who kindly volunteered to show us around. We began in Nara Park, a pleasant, forested park with lots and lots of deer. The deer are smaller than those you might see in the West, and they are so used to people that they have literally no reaction to tourists walking around them, taking their picture or even petting them! They're hilariously cavalier about the whole thing. The park has a beautiful lake, surrounded by cherry trees (so you can imagine what a sight it must be in sakura season) and a big gazebo right in the middle. Afterwards it was already time for lunch, so we went somewhere nearby because Yoko "knows a restaurant". That turned out to be Edo-san , an amazing inn/restaurant that doesn't occupy one building, but a set of small houses, one of which had been accommodated to be our dining room. It was an extraordinary experience,

I went to a Japanese bakery today and found the experience to be very... deceptive. You see, when you walk into a Japanese rice cracker shop, you see rice crackers. That's what they are. But , when you walk into a Japanese bakery, you see Western breads and buns, but that's not what they are at all! I walked down the aisle seeing all this bacon bread and pizza bread, thinking, fair enough, there's that in France too, and then I see this beautiful, soft, golden bun, looking delicious, and I decipher the Japanese tag enough to read -"fish bread"? What? No. No! Fish doesn't go in there! My goal, anyway, was to have melon pan, something that piqued my curiosity back when I gave Yakitate Japan a try (I dropped it because the Japanese was just too difficult to me, but the manga itself is hilarious). It's a regular bun, with a greenish layer of frosting on the top (it looks like frosting, at least, but it's not too sweet), and filled with a very light me