Kyoto

Day 355 (June 18, 2019) – Kyoto, Japan

Japan is an introvert’s paradise. People are generally quiet, soft-spoken, and always exceedingly polite. Conversations are a rarity on trains and buses. Every restaurant has plentiful counter seating, so eating alone is never an issue for concern. In fact, a few ramen restaurants we visited even had dividers set up between counter seats, which nearly completely obscured the identity of your neighbor. Although Japan’s culture of introversion has the potential to become extreme for those who live there, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Our bus from Hiroshima to Kyoto. The bus driver held his umbrella overhead for everyone departing and re-entering the bus at rest stops, and he repeatedly thanked everyone for riding the bus that day. 

This culture of limited verbal communication even made travel easier for us at times. My favorite bus trip in Japan was from Hiroshima to Kyoto. Each seat had a retractable cover that could be drawn down around your head. Don’t want to talk or even look at your neighbor? Just pull down your head shade and the world disappears. The bus made frequent breaks at highway rest stops. Although the announcements were always in Japanese, there was a placard placed at the front of the bus that displayed the time that the bus would depart the rest stop. Without having to talk to anyone or understand Japanese, we felt like we always knew what was going on thanks to all the visual cues.

A demonstration of the head covers.

We had another tiny apartment in Kyoto. This was just a single room that was both the living area and the sleeping area, depending on if the futon sleeping mats were tucked away or laid out. The only furniture was a small coffee table and a mirror in the corner.

Our Kyoto apartment. The futons in the corner were pulled out into the room to turn the living room into the bedroom.

We were feeling a bit weary of being tourists at this point on our trip. Our energy and enthusiasm for travel has come and gone many times during our almost year-long trip, but our time spent in Kyoto was particularly difficult for mustering up the energy to get out and do things. In some sense we were wasting a stop because Kyoto is one of Japan’s most touristed cities. There is history and culture everywhere. But at the same time, it was exactly this touristy atmosphere that kind of turned us off the whole thing. Kyoto was much more crowded than anywhere else we had been so far in Japan. We still made it out to a few temples, walked all over the city, and even spotted a few geisha, but we turned down trips to some of the harder to reach main attractions.

Kyoto could be congested with tourists at times, but understandably so.

Regardless of our wavering enthusiasm for sightseeing, we were always excited for meals. For us, Kyoto was all about exploring Japan’s deep-fried cuisine. When I think of deep-fried dishes in the US, my mind always goes to some Texas-inspired deep-fried heart attack, like fried Oreos, fried butter, or chicken fried bacon. But in Japan, fried foods are a delicately crafted art form. One of our best meals was at a tempura restaurant. We each got a giant bowl of rice topped with a collection of tempura creations, including eel, shrimp, fish, vegetables, and even a soft-boiled egg, all encased in light and crispy tempura batter. It was phenomenal. And the best part was that we got seats at the counter and could watch the chefs work their magic right in front of us.

Watching our tempura dinner being prepared.

The other meal that became a staple of ours was tonkatsu, a breaded and fried pork cutlet served with shredded cabbage, miso soup, and rice. It makes for a delectable lunch. We also explored other variations. Our favorite was a combination of breaded and friend pork cutlet, shrimp, and hamburger. The attentiveness to detail in Japanese cuisine always astounded me. The tonkatsu was always served on a metal rack spanning half the plate. The other side of the plate was for the diced cabbage. This prevented the salad dressing used on the cabbage from reaching the fried food, which would have made it soggy. Such a simple and elegant solution for preventing a culinary catastrophe.

Tonkatsu for lunch. There was also fried shrimp and hamburger with sides of rice and miso soup.

While in Kyoto we had the most random opportunity to meet up with a friend from Chicago. Gloria, who was on a group tour through Japan with her friend, Fatima, just happened to be in Kyoto at the same time as us. They had started in Tokyo and were working their way south while we were working our way north and all of us found ourselves in Kyoto on the same day. We met up with the two of them and a few of their travel mates at a craft beer bar. It was a lot of fun, but it got even better.

Fatima and Travis at karaoke.

We decided to go with Gloria, Fatima, and a random Canadian guy we had met at the bar, out for a night of karaoke. Although introversion may be the cultural norm in Japan, that standard seems to fly out the window when karaoke is involved. We got to the karaoke studio and signed up for a room for the five of us. The room reservation also included an open bar, which meant that every once in a while, a new pitcher of beer would be delivered by the staff. Between our earlier beers from the bar, these new pitchers of beer that kept showing up, and the fact that for the past two months we had been drinking low alcohol content Chinese beer, we were feeling pretty heady. We sang our hearts out and had a blast. We even added more time. We were just getting into it when our first hour was up. It was so much fun, although we would pay for it the next day. In addition to copious amounts of water and a few pills, we learned that the next best cure for a hangover might just be a giant bowl of piping hot ramen.

Gloria and Fatima's rendition of Taylor Swift's Shake It Off.