Thursday: Life on the street


Here's a street near Nene House - the road up to Kiyomizu early in the morning.  Streets like this are lined with shops, mostly selling one thing:  An incense shop, an umbrella shop, a mochi shop, a fan shop.




And after a couple of hours the street looks like this:



There are a lot of pedestrian streets in our neighborhood, dotted with a number of traffic cops whose sole purpose seems to be to get people out of the way when a car needs to get through.  I can give you a few of the sights, but none of the smells, which are all around, and all very good.

The Japanese I've met are very nice, and more open to interaction that I'd imagined (see my last post).  For instance, here are a group of schoolboys who wanted to ask me some scripted questions in English - I believe they had an assignment to.  I took a cute video of them and if I can figure out how to put that up I will.


And here's a couple of young ladies who asked Wes and I if we could pose for a photo with them - clearly they wanted to take the beauty factor of their photo to 11:


Here are more of these women out for a stroll who have rented their outfits and their makeup session.  Quite the color rush:


There are Buddhist reminders everywhere in Kyoto.  Here's a Jizo shrine right in the heart of this shopping district.  


The swastika is a Buddhist symbol, and displayed on things often.  The Buddhist version points left - toward our recessive side, our quiet side.  I remember Sasaki Roshi really wanted Buddhism to reclaim the symbol.  He'd seen the Christian sign of the fish on car bumpers and with a chuckle he suggested we put a swastika on ours.  This was the early 90s when we were the only white skinheads around, and a couple of the monks wore black bother-boots to town.  So that's another thing we never got around to.  

Here are a few other random sights:  


A jumble of rooflines.


Some kind of edible substance, dusted with green tea powder


That's about $2.80.  A bargin served with a smile.  


Wes and Shiela in front of the Nene House


The day comes to a close.





Comments

  1. GenkoMarch 23, 2018 at 2:13 PM

    You should eat some of those matcha tea powder-covered mochi goodies before you leave! Never pass up a good tea sweet. Glad you are having a good time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KoshinMarch 24, 2018 at 4:32 PM

    Hey Genko! Oh I did and I have - I've feel like I've eaten one of everything. Shopkeepers often have little samples out, and I haven't been shy. I love the little triangle envelope mochis best so far. Thought of you here a number of times, lately at the gorgeous tea room at Nanzen-ji. One of many things that I got a photo of, but didn't make it into the blog...

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