We got some shaved ice to cool ourselves down, we headed down the little street Sannen-zaka. If you can imagine there are no tourists in the picture, Sannen-zaka is actually quite a charming place.
What’s this, lol. At least they got the good sense to blend in with the zen theme.
There are a lot of kimono rental places in Kyoto. I wonder how they clean up all those sweaty kimonos.
Passed by the very historical and oldest yudofu restaurant in Kyoto- Okutan that I originally was thinking about going for lunch. Okutan has been around for a whopping 370 years. To put it in perspective, the United States, where I live, has been around since 1789. This modest yudofu shop, started in 1635, was already 154 year old when the U.S. came about. Alas, one couldn’t fit everything into one trip, so Okutan would have to wait for another time.
Yakasa Pagoda. Surprisingly not too many tourists on that stretch of the road, considering this is the shot that has graced book covers:
But of course, to take such a picture, one would need to get up at 5am when there’s nobody clogging the street, hire a geisha to pretend that she just happens to be walking by. Ah, the power of photography, creating a visual that one would almost never run into.
We eventually made it down to the Yakasa Shrine, where the Gion Matsuri starts and ends every year.
And beyond the gate, modernity awaits:
Well, kind of, since its still Gion, where many goes to get a taste of the old world Kyoto, on some side streets. We were hungry, and ended up on a random place called the Gion Duck Rice.
The high school science lab experiment look-alike was actually our dinner. The food was a bit gimmicky, quite average. The place was full of tourists, had a server that spoke fluent American English (major warning signs right there!!! I think our server said she lived in SoCal.). We were really tired and hungry so we just sat down. In hindsight, we should have probably gone to their better-rated sister restaurant Gion Duck Noodles, or other restaurants in Gion instead. Although many only served known patrons, I was told.
Green pepper, yuzu powder and black pepper:
The chazuke was decent, except the cha was lukewarm…
During dinner, we talked about the rare sightings of geisha in Gion were mostly confined to geishas walking to the next engagement before dinner time. That most tourists never saw one. After dinner, we were on Shijo-dori waiting to cross to the other side. I was looking down, fiddling with my camera while waiting…
…when my wife suddenly started poking me and asked me quietly whether the person waiting right next to me was a geisha. Well, yeah. The geisha was standing right there. I guess Kyoto is a marriage between old and new Japan. Didn’t really occur to me that geisha would be, just like the rest of us, doing modern things like, e.g. waiting for the light to turn green and not jaywalk, or, who knew, maybe going to Lawsons and get a charging cable for her iphone.
Gion:
And that concluded our couple of days in Kyoto.
