very important moss

I'm on Skype listening to some awesome faux-techno music spliced with lively and hip Cingular (the new AT&T) advertisements. And now I'm talking to a middle-aged woman with a Southern accent about canceling my account. And now I'm having my account transferred to a great friend with a 919 area code who is being called at this moment (7:30 am US Eastern Time) to be asked if all this is okay with her. This is just one example of the domestic hassles one finds oneself flustered with while in foreign lands. They eventually get resolved, or else you just pay more money. But i refuse to travel down that road. Better to have your cell phone company phone your friends at 7:30 am and charge them $18.

My first real day in Kyoto, spent on bicycle. I biked from the center all the way up northeast to visit Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion Temple) for the second time (first time was way back when), mainly because i was there before only at night and was curious to see how more sunlight might enhance the landscape -- there lies a temple and a pavilion, which is called silver yet is composed of ancient drab wood, both nestled in a garden with zen sand paintings, craning twisted pine trees, carp-filled murky ponds -- all covered in a sea of radiant moss. I didn't catch why, but moss is special on these temple grounds. There even sits a stand displaying at least 20 types of moss, and six of them are denoted in English with the sign "Very Important Moss: Like VIP." As soon as i got to the hill path of shops that climbs to the temple grounds, i got myself a sakura-flavored (cherry blossom) ice cream cone. Upon leaving, i already had in my hand some akashiso sembe (rice cracker with red shiso) on a stick, and thus began my day of gorging on Kyoto junk food.
I biked down tetsugaku no michi (the philosopher's path), which i had walked my last time, and found that i failed to achieve the same degree of inspiration while speeding down on a vehicle. Still pretty though. I proceeded down to Nanzenji (South Zen Temple), which features an enormous temple with one of the three largest gates in Japan, and a really cool old guy who was drawing a meticulously detailed picture of an aqueduct nearby surrounded by trees and stones. Unfortunately, an expensive but extraordinary tofu restaurant called Okutan that i dined in last time was closed. It did save me nearly 30 bucks.
I am typing all this on the morning after said events happened. I'll write a more detailed description later.

soaked to the core in kyoto

I'm soaking wet sitting on the tatami floor of my new hostel in Kyoto. In a relatively poor mood, and looking forward to a day of rain-drenched fun in Temple-Central, Japan. Backtrack~~!

Took a night bus last night and managed to sleep in a comfortable yet cramped seat. Woke up and arrived in Kyoto station and stumbled into a manga cafe for cheap internet because i had no idea where my hostel was. Because i'm such a bright young man, i used the map i printed as a bookmark in Tokyo station. To my surprise, when i looked for said map after leaving the small cafe i was wasting time in before my bus, it was gone. I copied down the directions into a notepad, lugged my luggage outside, and realized it was raining. The umbrella i bought in a convenience store not two days ago had similarly vanished. So i had to hike out to my hostel in the rain, and even though i knew the hostel would open at 8 and it was only 7:15, i decided to test the fates and brainlessly complete my quest. I was not shocked when i saw the hostel door shut, and although a head was bobbing around in a room beyond the door, it did not face me and relieve me of the elemental fury that lashed my body and valuables outside. So i walked along back to the station and ducked into Cafe Veloce, a Japanese-style Western cafe, complete with crustless sandwiches, royal milk tea, and small strawberry white chocolate scones in plastic wrappers. I devoured two sandwiches and slurped down some tea while reading some of the same book that carelessly lost my map--Number9dream by David Mitchell. In this part of the story, the main character's life and current trials become intertwined with a video game-style narrative, and it becomes hard to pull the two apart. I trudged back to the hostel at 8.15 in clothes that feel like they'd been stripped off a bloated drowned corpse. Upon entering the now lit hostel reservation room, i found the owner, a slightly bearded Japanese dude on a stool, who greeted me in English after my feeble and tired Japanese good morning. I snapped at him when we lapsed into an exchange of question and answer about internet usage and his "can" sounded much too much like "can't." I felt bad, but i also felt like a water-logged rat who just crawled out of the sewer after a thunderstorm.

And here i am! I am leaving shortly to jump around in puddles and maybe see a rainy view of a temple or two with a girl from Westchester, NY (of all places) that i just met. Although gaijin travelers can be an annoying bunch, most are more than willing to drop everything and go traipse around a foreign town with strangers. More later.

day trip to Nikko

If it was not painfully obvious from the title, I took a day trip to Nikko today from Tokyo. About two hours away and only 40 bucks to see everything and ride the train just about everywhere in the environs, it's a pretty good deal, considering Nikko has some of the awesomest temples this side of Kanto. Nikko also just happens to be one of the most popular tourist sites in the country, and most of those tourists are Japanese. If you're wondering why, I should also mention that Tokugawa Iesyasu himself is buried there. Not to mention the presence of numerous memorable cultural treasures, such as the carvings of the San Zaru (Three Monkeys: no see, no hear, no speak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_wise_monkeys) and the Nemuri Neko (Sleeping Cat: carved by Hidari Jingoro, a famous left-handed sculptor from the Edo period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidari_Jingoro). You may not detect it from the electronic text, but a vein of sarcasm runs through the last line. Although these carvings, and other such "sights to see," may in fact have great importance to Japanese culture, they are nonetheless quite small and would be fairly unnoticeable if it weren't for the 500 yen ticket to enter the area blessed by the Sleeping Cat's existence, not to mention all the Sleeping Cat souvenirs that line the temple walls around it. But i shouldn't be so negative about the sights of Nikko, for there were some very extraordinary attractions: the Naki Ryuu (Crying Dragon), a painting on the ceiling of a temple that supposedly resonates the sound of two wooden blocks striking (a Buddhist monk strikes them as we all look ceiling-wards... perhaps it's the architecture that's the culprit, but who's calling for a detective?); the hyper-cool decorative carvings of dragons, tigers, and old men riding tigers that line most of the temples; the equally cool 10-foot statues of furious gods with Dragon Ball Z-style flaming hair; the forests of thick towering pines that surround the grounds; the hordes of schoolchildren and old women that swarm like locusts around anything of the remotest interest.
After having an overdose of traditional Japanese culture (aka "templed out"... a term used among jaded gaijin), i headed to a stop on the train called Kinugawa Onsen. Onsen means hot spring, and i desperately wanted to soak in hot medicinal water after the long day. When i got there, a policeman told me that the onsen was closed, and i moped over to a manjuu (little cakes filled with red bean paste) store to gawk at sweets awhile before my train came to go home in defeat. I started talking to one of the clerks about onsen and macha, and she dragged another clerk into the conversation who ended up offering me some salty plum macha with little breadcrumbs (delicious!) and driving me to the local bathhouse so i could get in an hour or two with some old naked Japanese guys before going home. Many Japanese are unbelievably helpful and go tremendously out of their way to give you a hand. The bathhouse was everything and more--aside from the pleasures of soaking in an outdoor bath surrounded by forest, i met the man who runs the Snoopy Store in Harajuku. I bowed to the Tokyo manager of Snoopy consumables, and clutching a new bottle of freshly vended cold green tea, i boarded the train back to Asakusa and my hostel.

indescribable intensity

Sitting here again with my macbook opposite the blaring television playing the best karaoke hits on J-MTV, i finally have decided on a good description of popular Japanese television: "indescribably intense." The particular music video playing was a song called "otoko no michi" (the road to man), and featured a group of five or six singing young men standing in a half-circle and marching obnoxiously as rays of solid colors and various onomatopoeic three-letter words shot out from behind them like a wave of missiles. Also featured were clips of each individual singer singing and marching with a signature crazed face. I guess if i bothered to listen to the words, i might have been able to catch some meaning behind this song, but i was too mesmerized by all the action that i forgot to concentrate on anything in particular. And this is exactly why indescribably intense media is so dangerous: it drains you of any awareness you once had. And i am certainly not proposing this is a unique phenomenon to Japan. But here, it seems that popular media is expected to be frantic, relentless, and memorable (although in indecipherable fragments that encourage rampant consumption of items featuring these very images).
This is also surely not a ubiquitous feature of all Japanese culture. But after visiting Shibuya and Akihabara, an American is left with the impression that Tokyo is all about in-your-face and borderline hostile advertisement, unchecked consumption, and outrageous flare. Not for me. But there is much to appreciate besides all this. There are many sides to Tokyo, as one would imagine. More on this later.

my imminent return

As i sit at the table in the guest room of my hostel and sip warm sake, complimented with a brown sugar roll (a souvenir from Hokkaido left by a most generous guest), i cannot help but recall all the pleasant memories i have had during my two-day stay in Tokyo. I purposefully fail to recall all the unpleasant ones, as those have faded, replaced by the good ones. I just bought my night-bus ticket to Kyoto and my ferry ticket to Hakodate from Aomori today, so my previously amorphous plans have just acquired a new skeleton. The internal organs may still be lacking, but that never stopped skeletons from dancing before. With a top hat and cane.
Yes, things are coming together quite nicely. I also have purchased a prepaid cellular phone, which i plan to use to advance my social status, however transitory it may be for the frantic traveler. I am doing my best to save money by eating only at fast food restaurants (rest assured i am not speaking of mcdonald's or other hovels of grease), mainly those serving soba with various tempura thrown on top. I ate today at an establishment that demands its customers to select from a ticket machine their desired dish, and then to hand this ticket to the friendly cook behind the counter, whereupon he produces your dish in an absurdly quick fashion, so quick in fact that it seemed he had anticipated my order and had it waiting beneath the counter. But the quality was such that this was probably untrue, for the meal was extraordinary, perhaps on account of my ravenous hunger at the time.
Well, this is much to say, but I have not the patience to record it all now, and it will have to filter through the gray matter beneath my skull and become purified before it is worthy to be typed into this journal. Tonight i shall try my luck with the social scene, and should it prove noteworthy it shall be transcribed.