I write this immediately after watching Phoebe Bridgers perform her new song ‘Kyoto’, from her bathtub. I should probably point out this was for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, before you call the cops.
We rose from our hostel bunks one final time, ready for a final day of exploring before heading back to Tokyo for another one-nighter. Our schedule had gone a little haywire the last couple of days, but today’s plan was clear; visit Fushimi Inari-taisha. For those that don’t know it by name, it’s the famous orange gates that lead up Inari mountain. I’m going to level with you; I have zero recollection of how we got there. I remember and being annoyed that Julie checked the SUFC score (I wanted her to go into the highlights blind, in which I would add my own dramatic commentary), and then I remember being at the base of the mountain. This is why I should have written the whole blog in a few weeks, not 3 decades later. I do however recall the area not being half as busy as I had expected, which was nice. Whether it was just outside of busy season or we’d just arrived early enough, I’m not sure, but it meant we could take in some nice views in peace, and photos without people ruining it by being wearing clothes that clashed with their backdrop, or being blurry or whatever.
It’s difficult to give a blow-by-blow account of the walk, but just believe me when I say it was pretty magical. Essentially, it’s just hundreds or orange painted arches you’re walking through, but something about it feels poignant and important. Hard to explain really, but you can really feel history washing over you the higher you climb. Also, good for pictures, innit. Investigators of the syntax of the previous sentence will realise that “good for pictures” does not necessarily equal “I took good pictures”. But, here they are, warts n’all.
Shout out to one of only two cats we met that accepted strokes, half way up the mountain. Hey, boo.
Once we reached the top, we took a different route down, walking through deforested paths down to the bottom. We found ourselves ‘natures bridge’ (yes, I coined this amazing term), that we both climbed up, to varying success; can you guess who was best from the below?
That’s right, there’s no photo of me, bad as my climbing skills proved.
We had made some excellent time during today’s ventures, meaning we could make our way back to Tokyo early afternoon on another bullet train. We made sure we bought the correct tickets needed in order to have a good view of Fujisan, and bought ourselves bento boxes and a dessert for the journey. Now then. The dessert. Let me introduce you to – Yatsuhashi.
Ay caramba. It’s pretty simple really, it’s made from rice flour, sugar and cinnamon. That dark patch in the middle is red bean paste. Now let me tell you something. Are you listening? It was fucking DELIGHTFUL. We actually first had these on the aforementioned “samples dinner” we had earlier in Kyoto so we knew the hype was real. This little dessert goes into the upper echelon of exotic dessert finds, which was up to this point only occupied by kürtőskalács, discovered at a German Christmas market. Ah shit. Now I’m thinking of those, too. Now I can see them BOTH on a plate right in front of me. Christ. Both ready to be eaten. Shitting hell. brb.
OK so I had a long, hard think about Apartheid for 5 minutes, and my mind is clear again.
So we arrived in Tokyo once more, knowing we had one night before we were on our way again. However, our original plan was to arrive late at night so we had no plans at all. Well, not until Julie got on GOOGLE. As luck would have it, Tokyo’s first ever Nintendo store (believe it or not) had opened up in Shibuya. We ventured to the mall to go check it out.
We were saddened, disgusted, amazed, disappointed, and dumbfounded to find that there was a 90 minute queue to get into the shop. We both put our head in our hands. Disaster. Actually, no; I put my head in my hands, then looked up to find Julie calmly joining the queue. What the fuck was she doing? Quick bit of maths – we were going to spend 1/200th of our holiday queueing to get into a shop that we almost certainly were not going to buy from, that we could actually quite clearly see into without the need to queue. God damn. Well, I joined the queue as it was the only place we could argue this out. It went a little something like this.
Ad: Err… there’s absolu…
Nintendo chap: this way, please.
..and like that, we entered the shop. The wait had been a mere 7 minutes, tops. (Ok ok, so it doesn’t take me 7 minutes to three syllables, it was all for comic effect! Most of the blog is! I’ve never even been to Japan!)
The shop was definitely worth a 7 minute wait, but probably not 90 minutes. I’d say somewhere in the region of 36 minutes would be a fair pound-for-pound estimate. The shop had “lifesize” figures of Mario, Ryu, and the like, surrounded by all the Nintendo branded goods you could desire. Annoyingly, there were a lot of Nintendo/Pokemon crossover merch which was of zero interest to only a part-nerd like myself. Alas, it was great fun rummaging around the shop, dreaming of buying t-shirts had they been in an imaginary 90% off sale. Just next door was the Pokemon store. Now, honestly, I think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on with Pokemon. Not only have I never seen a single moment of the TV show, I also had in mind that it was ‘after my time’. However, everyone my age seems to know a lot about Pokemon, so.. *shrug*, who knows. Alas, I do not like it. It’s scummy, and full of chavs and stupid animals. We spent a good while in the shop, with Julie looking for presents for her nephew, messaging her sister for ideas. We were overheard by a couple who seemed rather giddy and utterly delighted to help us out. Poindexters.
We finally left, and made our way to the basement in search of much needed sustenance. Sadly we found no such food, but we did find another record shop (I should have counted, but I probably went to around 20 stores all holiday) and this was our best find. It was actually a mini HMV store so I didn’t hold out much hope, but managed to pick up three records I had been looking for all holiday. Win.
The rest of the evening was pretty none eventful; we eventually found ourselves in some sort of cheese restaurant where I ordered Carbonara and was surprised to find bacon in it (as I say, very weary at this stage of the holiday..), but I ate around the bacon and it was FINE. We then headed to the Starbucks that overlooks the famous crossing to get some decent photos. Or try at least. Did we succeed? You decided. But here’s a clue. No. No we didn’t.
15 days in Japan. 