2015-04-25: Kyoto, Traditions & Bad Tourists

I am in the seminar all day. Ewa can indulge in sightseeing. Kyoto is one of the more popular tourist destinations in Japan and has thousand of shrines, temples and so on. It also has lots of white people. Nagoya has set baselines which confuse us elsewhere. We are used to seeing the occasional white person but only a couple a day really.

Backyard of hotel.

I kind of like all the white people as they make me feel in good shape by comparison. In Nagoya I feel like a blundering fat bastard most of the time.

They keep the good rocks under cover out of the weather

Unfortunately another baseline has been set. We have seen some pretty great shrines and without any knowledge of the places or history they all look rather similar. Sort of like churches in Europe. After a couple all I ever end up doing is looking for silly things.

To be honest I am actually looking for silly things pretty much constantly.

So Ewa's grand tour of Kyoto was a couple of hundred metre stroll followed by a day studying her Japanese in the hotel. I guess studying Japanese in a tatami mat room is kind of cultural and cool though.

I spent ages watching these to see if someone would park their car in one of the lifts but they all refused to. 3/10

Food & Beverage Review: Game & Veges Izakaya

map ref
Next door to the hotel which is handy as I was knackered. All the tables have a central fire pit and lots of the dishes are cooked over the fire.

Piggy

The food is mostly wild game, especially Boar. We had a couple of the Boar dishes and they were good. However there was an interesting looking vege thing where you could choose the veges you wanted. We have been lacking in veges recently so ordered all of them. Due to our skills at pointing we got two dishes of veges. A plate of various grilled veges which was nice. Grilled spring onions are excellent.

And a little fire with a leaf covered in miso paste with mushrooms and spring onions. This was weird. The paste was kind of sweet and as it heated up it got stronger and stronger in flavour. You stirred it all up so the mushroom cooked in the paste. I think some people would really like it. I imagine I could come to really like it. But today I have done enough learning.

Rating: 6.5/10 (I think on a busy night in winter this place would be great for ambience)