Day 5 Part 2 Wednesday 2025 05 21 Market and Karaoke

 We traverse through the streets of Kyoto. It's quieter than Tokyo, but feels more steeped in history. A lot of wooden buildings and charming gardens and streams appear out of nowhere. What I remember though, was the heat and humidity. If you'll recall, these are one of my many weaknesses. I'm pretty soon in a muck sweat as middle age nerds are wont to do. 

We make it to the hotel but for some reason, there is nobody at the counter. There is even a sign to that effect, as if this is a normal occurrence and maybe we can phone them? The hotel is tiny. More like a short hallway of rooms stacked on top of each other. Upstairs we can hear the cleaning staff cleaning, but they aren't paid to deal with us. They pass by us on the way to get more supplies from their van and clearly are used to guests being utterly lost, staring at a sign on an abandoned counter.

We phone the number but whatever magickery that is an e-sim apparently won't let us complete the call. My wife manages to send them a message via Expedia and gets the information needed to get into our hotel. It was the oddest experience. We just got a code and.. let ourselves in.

After we decompress and settle in, it's off to Nishiki market. An ancient market that used to be for seafood, then was slowly converted into a highly efficient tourist trap of some cute stores interspersed with the same types of meat on a stick restaurants. There was even a very ancient knife store there but I have enough nice knives (two) and had no wish to deal with whatever questions might arrive from packing an extremely sharp knife in my suitcase. That and they were closed, so.

We've been stuck in this habit of buying the odd foods from different places along our travels, eating it there, and in AGGREGATE, this makes a meal. My partner thinks this is a perfectly acceptable way to have a meal. I feel like I'm just waiting for the meal to actually start. Although you wouldn't know it by looking at me, with my ample gut and respectable love handles, my brain seems to think I haven't had an actual meal for days. Which is to say that's exactly what we did here. We had a wonderful stuffed crepe (the Japanese seem enamoured with euro/French food, crepes, coffees, baked things), then a stick of meat. Then a single dumpling each. Then we shared some curry buns. Dinner done! 

It's a grazing style which I'm sure fits in with the more gregarious antelopes and international spies, I assume.

Then we continue to wander around different picturesque neighbourhoods. Temples around every corner. Google translate often doesn't offer up any interesting facts at these sites other than "no photography allowed", "Services every Thursday and Fri", and the like.

It's still hot, still humid. We survive on buying many, many drinks at various vending machines. Usually unusual (for us) drinks. They are cold and almost always delicious, outside of the aforementioned Pocari Sweat, none of them had names that gave us pause. But mainly, they were cold enough to stop us from overheating, too much.

I'm constantly using my phone to translate every single sign, looking for those sweet, sweet plaques. Most don't offer anything new, they are mundane or expected. 

This sign says "yes, you can walk through here". Why is there a 5? Why are there what looks to be two sting rays mating? Why do we need a sign when it's pretty clear you can walk through there. 

This sign was great because there was no indication it was anything other than, say, advertising the hours of a particularly conservative office supply store. No, it's a karaoke spot. KARAOKE.

I'm a big fan of karaoke. Maybe because I did quite a bit of choir as a youngster and enjoy singing, maybe because I enjoy singing to a crowd while inebriated. Well, I'm not sure you need any more reasons than that, but yeah, I enjoy it.

The partner and I decide we'll keep going to different neighbourhoods but our kids are tapping out. There are only so many quaint alleyways they can look at. Only so much vending machine drinks can do to bribe them along. Luckily they are older and can just make their own way back to the hotel.

I'm determined to sing some karaoke, but first must appease the partner. More walking! More muck sweating! More darling alleyways!

Kyoto being a very very old city, home of the emperor, there is no end to the quaint beautiful streets and houses.

But eventually we reach the end of sightseeing, and it's time for Karaoke! I decide on a well reviewed bar (https://cabaret.crayonsite.info/) that has it's own live DRUMMER! 

It was just us two. Now my wife is a great singer, but really only sings at home or with friends. It's me who needs the audience, I'm not ashamed to admit. But at this bar, it was just the two of us (it was really early), and the two owners, I think. The drummer who had a fantastically tight haircut and a love for all things music. And the bartender, a lovely woman who always seemed to be having a good time.

We started singing, just taking turns, and the drummer and bartender seem to really enjoy it. And for about an hour it was concert for two. Me steadily drinking more and more and everyone having a good time.

Then out of nowhere a pub-crawl arrives, about 10 folks from, well it sounded like they were from New York. My partner, mid song, has to finish her song, but gives me a look that very much said "I can't believe I'm singing in front of strangers this is all your fault you should really be up here what the hell". Now me and the missus are old hands at karaoke, enthusiastic amateurs. Both of us sang quite a lot in our youth so we know the ins and outs of a microphone and general, uhm, singiness.

The bar crawl picks, not much to my surprise, the standard standard, the standard of standards, the Big One, "My Way", by Frank Sinatra. Because New York/New Jersey, a certain generation, etc. And they pull one of us up there to help out. I give it my crooniest croon to ever croon to everyone's delight (or if not delight, then decently suppressed disgust, which is a win in my book). 

Turns out they don't all know each other but just are on the same bar crawl. One of them is a concert pianist and he treats us to some Mozart... Beethoven. Yes, I am a bit of a knuckledragger when it comes to actual classical music. But that is genuinely delightful. The drummer plays along, and while the concert pianist is a little chagrinned at the start I think he realizes he's playing to a bunch of inebriated middle aged plus folks just having a good time and just let's it go. The drummer's gotta drum, man. 

We finish the evening and head home, first day of Kyoto all done. At least I was no longer in a muck sweat.

Day 5 Part 1 Wednesday 2025 05 21 Travel to Kyoto

 It's finally time to leave Kyoto via shinkansen (aka, bullet train, minus the stylish assassin's and Brad Pitt, obviously). I am pretty excited about this. Nothing illustrates the utter Japanese dominance of public transport on the world stage than a train that goes faster than anyone who isn't sponsored by Pirelli tires would consider going. 

We, as seems the pattern, just buy food from the corner store for our meal. So as to keep the patina of 'hey, we're travelling' alive we make sure to buy things we couldn't buy in Canada. Protein milk! Pancakes prepackaged with jam and butter! Onigiri (rice balls with protein mixed in there)! It's a cultural experience. The best? No. Instagrammable? No. Cultural enough for our family? Apparently!

So we check out of our hotel, the lobby being on the second floor and packed with vending machines reinforcing the Japan-ness of it all, and hurry along our trip. 

This lobby, as I said, is on the second floor, and it has other stuff going for it other than the fantastic parquet floor and vending machines full of Pocari sweat. It's got those fake flowers which are more confusing than anything, those chairs in front that is too close to the desk and that everyone just awkwardly leans over to talk to the front desk, and that incredibly technological whizeromajidoo thing on the ceiling there. It might only be the air conditioning but it also might be something fanTASTIC and frankly I'd just like to keep the mystery alive there.

A few train transitions, during rush hour. This is really travelling on hard-mode, in case you are wondering. You know when you are taking transit and waiting for the flood of people to ebb a little to cross a hallway, or do something that requires a little more room than the exact amount of space it takes to spin in place? Well, at Tokyo station, that ebb never comes. Only more people in more of a rush than the other people you let pass by. Learning the whole zipper merge thing is key here. 

At some point we had to go from pillar to pillar. Like, take a break at a pillar so we didn't lose one of the family. And these are all older teenagers. I cannot fathom how anyone would do this with small children or tweens. Leashes? An air horn as backup? Attaching one of those flimsy flag poles with the tiny flag at the top you put on tricycles? 

On top of that is mere navigation from one line to the other, because, as you'd expect of a megacity, the train line system is... complex. Star at this diagram too long and I swear you'll start to see the Matrix, or take an unhealthy interest in advanced mathematics.

We grab some food, there are innumerable shops all selling lovely looking bento boxes and besides the delight there is the grudging bitterness that folks in Tokyo get to eat like this at every lunch hour, when in a RUSH. North America gets McGriddles, those pancake and process meat product monstrosities, and Japan gets THIS. 

We somehow don't lose any of the children and get aboard the shinkansen. It's spacious and seemingly ordinary, but then it started moving.

The train moves at about 280km/h, as measured by my phone. It's, fast. And it's not like a plane where you can eventually lose all frame of reference and just be sitting in a loud but generally motionless tube. No. There is the vibration, first of all, the kind that you only get by hurtling past any sense of safety speed and right into shinkansen speed. Then there is the landscape that is always HURTLING by. You never escape the feeling that you are moving, very close to the ground, in a train, of all things.

The most telling indicator of speed, however, is the fact that as the train has to turn and make course corrections through it's path, the rail is actually canted, or maybe the train leans somehow? But you can see the horizon dip as the train leans into these gentle curves. Well, they'd be gentle curves if we weren't going a QUARTER THE SPEED OF SOUND. Every minute sitting in that train, looking out the window is like being in a 90's extreme sports action movie. Not so prevalent now, young readers, but in the 90's extreme sports was a real thing. Snowboarding, base jumping, surfing, maybe? And all action movies involved a sequence of it, if not outright forming the entire movie around it. So sitting on the train felt like that. I felt I should be slamming a red bull and saying 'bro', a lot.

Even walking to the bathroom involves engaging your core and walking slightly wide-legged like a company man who has had to keep up, shot for shot, with his client who really wanted to tie one on and is too old and too rich to worry about things such as liver cancer or alcoholic comas.

We take another, ordinary train to get closer to our hotel. It has velour seats. This might be an attempt to emphasize the old timey-ness of Kyoto? Or maybe boasting the fact that Kyoto is so well maintained they can risk having velour in public transit. I feel like I'm on a train, in Vienna, going to a palace, at a time when trains were as rare as helicopter rides. I also feel vaguely like a too well dressed officer is about to stop me and menacingly ask for my papers. Velour does that I guess.

We finally make it to Kyoto, and prepare to hoof it to our hotel. Thankfully the entire trip involved no stylish assassin or Brad Pitt.

Day 4 Tuesday 2025 05 20 Tokyo National Museum,TeamLabs

Oh my GOD what 
does this all MEAN.

When I say that English translation is sketchy at best, what I really mean is there are too many signs that make me super curious but they are only in Japanese. All the really important signs, tsunami safe areas, transit instructions, prices for mechanical keyboards have English translations. But the frustration of seeing a really seemingly important sign and having to get my phone to help me out just leaves that impression.

I'm basically in a world of unreadable plaques. As I've mentioned my chronic addiction to plaques and reading them, you can imagine the frustration.

We do some laundry in the hotel laundry room. The whole yen conversion thing keeps my eyes from watering and realizing how much we are paying just to make sure we don't offend anyone on the local transit. 

Well, come to think of it, I think my upper limit for that convenience is pretty high. A Canadian not wanting to offend in the very polite Tokyo is like an ouroboros of etiquette from which, say, $20 dollars for a load of laundry would seem a DEAL. 

The laundry has built in soap dispenser. We can't figure out how it works, and to add tot he confusion the translation says we have to add soap? We trust our googling and just let the machine do it's thing. It's one of those odd things that remind you you're in an entirely different country. If the food and city lights and different language and lingering jetlag has somehow not clued you in.

We start the day off right, we are going to get Japanese pancakes. Which are super fluffy and I'm sure fed to one my kids through the Algorithm (yes I warn them about it, no I don't know how effective my warnings are, we are going to get Japanese pancakes, after all). It's the standard wandering around then realizing we are RIGHT there, but.. not right there, oh right it's 4 stories up. But not above a Uniqlo, so you can imagine our confusion.

We get by on the point and saying 'arigato gozaimasu', ALOT. This being western-ish food surrounded by western-ish decor it's not as fraught with awkwardness and the worry of Doing the Wrong Thing. How does someone with this much low-grade background anxiety travel? Er, when his partner insists, clearly.

 

It's a scorcher on the day (like, 24C, but the humidity brings that extra level of discomfort that can only really be found when travelling) we decide to huddle indoors and avoid the heat. I think my wife decides this, knowing my utter unsuitability for the outdoors or really any situation where the ambient climate does not match exactly a Rare Books Library Archive somewhere in Michigan at spring time.

We're around Ueno Station, so there are many many museums. Art Museums, Archaeology Museums, Cultural Museums? But we opt the the National Museum since that sounds, well, more.. more. 

I have a very vague notion of what's going to be there. Samurai things? Tea implements? I tell myself I should do really do deep and impressive research for every country I visit, and I can tell you , the intent is as undimmed as the first time we ever travelled anywhere. Undimmed and unfulfilled, a byline of my autobiography if ever there was one. (hm, maybe also "A little too warm, are you sure it's only Spring", "Dad bod since 13", "A Life History if the Insurance Program From Tron Was a Human Man", "Vaguely unfit for most things", "But I Digress").

In anycase, the Tokyo National Museum.

We first wander into the Asian artifacts, I think;  I'm butchering this. But it's the equivalent of all the UK museum of Anthropology, aka Things We Got From Imperialism and Refuse to Return. Buddha figures from China. Hmmm. No date on when it was acquired but we'll just gloss over it. There is a group of Chinese tourists and they seem pretty chill about the whole thing so maybe it's fine?

Tracing Buddhism, as an initially Indian religion and then as it morphs and changes across Asia is pretty cool. The intermingling of cultures and how countries influence each other over hundreds of years is fascinating. Although we all seem to subscribe to countries as monolithic, sovereign entities that sprouted whole made from the ground, Anthropology has other opinions.

Buddhism, as idea; an idea that propagates and strives to keep itself alive over time and geography (you know, the original definition of the word meme) was initially very strong in Japan. But around 1000 AD some noble got the idea that end days were coming and we better hide away ideas (sutras) in mounds. And I guess the whole 'we are all gonna die' maybe put a damper on Buddhism, and I suppose that's why Shintoism got a stronger hold after that. But then the idea and flavour of Buddhism was, well, confusing. There are gods, some that come from India, some that come from other Japanese traditions. I'm sure I'd have to get at least a continuing education certificate to get the merest inkling of how it all fits together.

The next area was just straight up archaeology, covering all the way from the Paleolithic to the Edo period. As much as I love plaques I could only get through 4 of the 16 sections. 

What struck me is how Japan, as a country was influenced by China, having envoys and religious ideas pass back and forth.

I'm sure there are very good museum curatory
reasons to not have the super cool handle on the
blade, but it just looks odd.

We made it to what I think all dad's look for, the Samurai room. They had really ancient blades on display, as well as a blade made by the first master swordsmith who figured out that wavey kinda pattern on the edge of the blade technique (this is actually from super high heat tempering). What was interesting is that up close, it's far more uneven and looks like, well, flames were put the blade, which makes sense. But all those movies and cartoons make that wavey edge look too uniform and pretty. What else could movies possibly be lying to me about.

This was a display of ceramics. Specifically ceramics that came about because China due to some military pressures, moved all their pottery and ceramics from the ports, so it was much more difficult to get them. So Japanese pottery kind of took over. That's some super cool interconnectedness of history for ya. Alot of the ceramics at this time period were in the style of Chinese pottery, but had subtle Japanese touches. No, don't ask me what those are, I'm only here for the plaques.

This Buddhist deity is featured quite a bit. I don't retain any cool Plaque Facts! about him, except in every depictions I've seen of him, he has like a 26 pack. Abs on top of abs on top of abs plus a menacing expression are the keys to nirvana, apparently.

Ok, my only artsy fartsy photo, I promise. Looking up
from one of the atriums.

Right after, my daughter insisted we try takoyaki, which I think is basically, balls of squid with sauce? It was amongst an array of things we had tried at different times due to her urging. The day was hot, and sticky and in no way resembling a well air-conditioned second hand book store int he fall, we were tired, but yeah, hot balls of fried seafood!? Let's go for it. 

Luckily outside the museum was the cutest food truck in existence. 

We tried some, I enjoyed them. But maybe they were too cephalopody and soft for my kid's taste. But I grew up eating dim sum. Unnameable balls of umami are what I'm all about. Overall consensus from the family was "That was interesting". Eating by Instagram is a strategy fraught with peril.

In EXISTENCE.

After that we are off to eat at one of those ramen places where you have a tiny cubicle and never have to interact with anyone. An introverts dream. This is apparently the dream of many other lunch goers as there is a long, snaking line, in the somewhat intolerable heat. Enough to get this nerd into the familiar muck sweat.

Much sweat, the slowest of lines, legs sore from the walking the museum, this really does call for some hot, rich broth and noodles. We apparently do not take the weather into account for our eating habits.

Ichiran, is the place, and I use Google translate to read their little spiel they have in every cubicle. They are very secretive, this is the best broth ever, and no one person knows how it all fits together. As a wall of text to hype you about the food, this was pretty good. And the food was good too, I'm not an expert in food.. things. But yeah, great ramen, minimal interaction.

The funny thing was there was a light board that indicated what seats were available and which were occupied. Further decreasing the need for any human contact at all. But it was clearly on the fritz, and maybe had been for years/decades. 

The Japanese need to have eating arrangements while avoiding any unnecessary human contact predates touchscreens, apparently. This looks like it was made around the time people thought disco was a pretty good idea.

But in what I can only assume is a manifestation of a mini-cargo cult, the server would constantly check it to tell them, uh, I guess that it was still broken? Lights flashed off and on and there was no pattern. Folks at seats had blinking green lights, lights, no lights, red lights. But the server would always check the board ("nope, day 89519 and still broken"), then check the seats, THEN sit people down. It was baffling but maybe it was just part of the workflow. Time honoured work flow. From the time of stagflation, the OPEC oil crisis, and a group hallucination in which everyone thought John Travolta pointing at the sky while his hips went in another direction was dancing.

It makes me wonder if there was a senior worker there who insists that everyone check that chaotic board of non-information before seating anyone. And during training days, he'd catch them and ream them out when they only checked the seats, and not the Flickering Lights 5000. Then he'd comb back his sideburns, fix his butterfly collar, and call it quits for the night to go to a nightclub called Disco ForEVER whose patrons had dwindled over the years to the  owner, a flea bitten stray cat, and 82 year old twin sisters who always confused the dance hall for a flower shop that had closed down 30 years ago.

After that we headed back to the hotel to chill out, have some screen time, and prepare for TeamLabs Planet.

The train took us through more open parts of Tokyo and we saw all manner of extremely cyberpunk buildings. Now I realize saying that is backwards, since cyberpunk and that entire genre got it's aesthetic clues from Japan, and not the other way around, but you get what I'm saying.

This was one of the coolest train rides for us Japan, since it showed us all the really wide open parts of Tokyo, with all it's baffling and rad looking buildings

Maximum Cyberpunk (I think it's a convention
centre)

Definitely not a place where they train cybernetically enhanced vultures to 
harvest the ND 327450 matrix core from fallen Mecha Hunter V2 off of
Orions belt.

Team labs is an experiential art museum with lots of cool interactive large art installations. It was cool, but also, a Gram Trap? Is that a thing. It totally was that. It had the indefinable sturdiness of an experience that was engineered to usher in thousands and thousands of people through it every day. That quality you feel when going to a really well run theme park comes to mind. 

This looks super cool in
a photo, most boring IRL.

Me reading the Oh God This Makes Me Feel Dumb
Artist statement. In so many languages, but no code.

The artists statements were long and mostly inscrutable but did have fun things to say. Again, not an artist, or a critic. I think real art snobs would likely hold their noses up at it. But it was fun for me and my family. I'm not sure if it lead to any deep feelings or thoughts. Except for a lot of installations mentioned they used software to say, emulate the movement of koi that would do some collision detection with visitors in the water and all I could think was "show us the source code, cowards". 

It seemed to be a bit of a tourist attraction/trap, as that was the highest concentration of tourists we had ever seen in one place. Maybe all the locals have already tried it, or gotten wise, or would rather avoid any enclosed space looking at bright lights being surrounded by tourists. That seems a reasonable take. 

After a few hours, we are done done done.

We are all wrapped up, absolutely tired out, but we gotta eat. Our daughter is tasked with finding some place to eat. All me and my wife can think is, 'no more ramen'. She finds us some place with bar food and various fried things.

Wee wander through, now that I'm looking at the pictures again, REALLY crowded streets near Ueno. Restaurants on top of restaurants inside bars on top of wagyu eateries besides grocery stores. At some point while visiting this seems pretty normal.

Thing is, we haven't eaten at alot of restaurants, it's always a bit daunting. Tokyo being so vast, there isn't many places where there are only tourists, so restaurants are not specifically geared towards tourists waltzing in and mangling their language or pointing menus like cave people. But that's what you have to do, point and hope the staff are patient with you. Which has always been the case. But what between my anxiety about offending and my general Canadian-ness plus with a healthy layer of nerd, well, it's, how do you say, character building.

However, the place we find is in an area with tons and tons of little eateries and restaurants and dive bars. And the one we picked in particular, is more a dive bar vibe. No English anywhere. It has that grimed in lived in look of a spot that's the favourite of locals, probably the kind of place that has a smoking and non smoking section but the non-smoking section is more of a suggestion than anything. 

We drift to loitering stop outside. We are daunted.  I'm thinking "uh oh, another day eating egg sandwiches and onigiri from the local corner store". My daughter got us there, but then urges me forward, this is my thing, apparently. It helps that I always just surge forward like this is the most natural thing in the world. Fake it until you make it indeed. Or fake it until you are full of karaage, is my take.

Well, courage is a thing I'm trying to cultivate. Which I figure only happens when I'm scared/awkward/uncertain. Which well, yeah, I was all three at least. I just square the shoulders and walk in.

This is a burger. Technically correct.

The server at the front looks only mildly surprised at our appearance, clear tourists. And then he, I kid you not, asks us smoking or non-smoking. Actually, he kind of makes a sketchy motion towards his face like he's taking a puff then nods yes or no. 

Perfunctory lobby at the front that has 3 tables it is, then. 

KARAAGE. Yes, 
I do feel this needs to
be yelled like I am charging
into battle.

Luckily, this restaurant seems to suffer from the same aversion to any human contact that the ramen place does, and he motions toward a QR code. No need to bumble through the 10 or so words I kind of know in Japanese, then. 

The place turns out to be super friendly and the food is great. Bar food, little fried croquettes, karaage, the kids order burgers because of course they do. But this is just a hamburger patty on a hot plate, but they seem happy. The other food was suitably delicious and bar foody.

 It was a great end to the day, which left us notably undimmed and fulfilled.