Silver Week: Japanese Kansas is much more interesting, specially with Vulcanus! (Part 3)

Heeeeello Ozzies!

Silver Week, day 2! In the menu: Kurashiki and Okayama. Since I already spoke about Kurashiki on the previous post, I will go straight to the pictures. Voila!

The channel, before the tourists start the crash and burn...

The Impressionist museum of Kurashiki, and Monika's face (sunglasses for the morning...the life of a tourist is very hard!)

This small village has some really lovely corners (as in 'what a lovely hat you're wearing today Mrs. Potter!'), plus a very interesting Impressionist museum (here I'm just quoting one of the guides we were using during the trip: in our personal crusade against Western-style expression in Japan, we only visited places 100%-proof Japanese. Maybe it's stupid, but I can see paintings of Renoir when I get back to France, don't you think?). We also visited our first Buddhist temple (at least I did!). I have to say, I was quite impressed at the beginning: it was a world completely apart, surrounded by silence. And you can see that the arrangement of the space has been carefully chosen to make it more appealing to the eye. But this is also characteristic of the shinto shrine. I think it is in fact quite characteristic of the Japanese culture in general, even though religious spaces are more prompt to show it.


The stairs heading for the Buddhist shrine...(What is Pepe doing, sitting on the stairs?)

Group photo, in front of the buddhist temple!

Pepe, showing me how to take pictures with the camera (Don't center the people in the photo! You have to try and put the persons in one of the squares, blabla, blabla, blabla...)

More temple pictures, this time featuring Paul (Why the hell are you taking me in this picture? I'm kicking your ass...)

Davide, as "The thinker" (in a completely different background, but...).

Monika, and another view of the temple.

Entrance of the shinto shrine. Beautiful, isn't it? The silence, the light gently pouring through the trees...

Alina and Pedro, in the entrance to the shinto shrine. (Why everybody is looking at the camera with that look of Why the heck is he taking this pictures?)

The shinto shrine!

So we wondered around the temple, then went to a nearby shrine and its gardens, and finally dived into the touristic area of Kurashiki (= the place where all the tourists and the touristic shops where). Not a single Westerner on sight! We were completely surrounded by Japanese tourists of all sorts: groups, couples, families, loners,...Specially around a mall called Ivy Square. Now this I found it quite puzzling: if you tell a Japanese you've been to Kurashiki, and he happens to know the place, the first image that will come to his mind will be this mall packed up with souvenir shops, fashion shops, food shops, blablabla shops...Something like thinking associating Toledo with its touristic shops. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here: Ivy Square has SOME history. It was the former site of a textile company very important for the local economy during the 20th century or so. But that is it. I mean, the rest of Kurashiki has much more to offer.

Before getting to our next destination we did a small stop at the tourist office in order to look for the accomodation of our stay in Hagi (yes, always in a rush, yes...). Spanish photo in front of the Tourist Office.

Three clappings of shoes after we landed in Okayama. Okayama is famous mainly for three reasons: pottery, the Kōraku-en (one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan, and...Momotarō! And you may wonder: 'Who's Momotarō?' He's the Peach Boy! I'm quoting the Wikipedia here: Momotarō came to Earth inside a giant peach, which was found floating down a river by an old, childless woman who was washing clothes there. The woman and her husband discovered the child when they tried to open the peach to eat it. The child explained that he had been sent by Heaven to be their son.Years later, Momotarō left his parents for an island called Onigashima to destroy the marauding oni (demons or ogres) that dwelt there. En route, Momotarō met and befriended a talking dog, monkey, and pheasant, who agreed to help him in his quest. At the island, Momotarō and his animal friends penetrated the demons' fort and beat the demons' leader, Ura, as well as his army, into surrendering. Momotarō returned home with his new friends, and his family lived comfortably from then on. There's even a song for kids! Here's a picture of his statue in front of the station. He even has a street named after him (and not a small one, no: I think it´s the one going from the station to the castle...)

We wanted to try the specialty of the region (barazushi), but the restaurant was closed, so some Chinese food had to do the trick.



The  city in itself is quite uninteresting since it's of very recent construction (WWII...). Still, the garden is worth the detour. It is considered one of the best three gardens of Japan (the other two are Karaiku-en in Mito and Kenroku-en in Kanazawa. I wonder why they are all located in remoted, totally boring cities...(sorry for that Hitachi people...but you really live in the inaka, apparently)) because of the design of the landscape and the arrangement of space.  Here´s some pictures to prove it, plus some other stupid ones we did on the way.

One of the bridges to walk around the park: Happy family pictures Inc.!

Artistic photo here...

We also took our first Japanese tea in this garden (remember I told you Okayama was famous for its pottery? In most cases, this means the spot is also famous for its Tea Ceremonies and the tea utensils it produces: pottery = flower pots + tea bowls + sweet bowls + ...).

Personally speaking, I prefer the Japanese way of preparing tea, and also the type of tea used. The taste is more bitter, the color more appealing to the eye, and the way it matches with the okashi (Japanese sweet) is simply great. But there are some exceptions of course (God saves me if I ever say something bad about Mariage Frères' tea!)

Marcin doesn't like much being taken in pictures, apparently...Smile!

We also went to Okayama's castle, also called "The Crow Castle" because it's black. A very beautiful reproduction of the original one (blown to pieces during WWII), made of concrete and iron...It kind of loses its magic, so we didn't get inside.

Apparently, the people from Okayama are not very used to seeing gaijins, specially kids. Well, the mother doesn't look very used to neither, lol.


Back to the hostel, we took some beers in a nearby pub...




...and while I was talking on the phone, my lovely and funny friends decided to give way to their artistic expression with my digital camera. So when I came back, everybody was looking at me with stupid smiles on their faces, watching my moves as I was approaching to my seat and taking the camera. The reason? Well, I think it has something to do with this picture, but I'm not sure...(here there was supposed to be a picture of XXXXX's ass, but you never know who's reading the blog, so in the final draft I had to erase it...sorry for all of you who had such high hopes...)

How am I to put barriers to so much creativity? I couldn't keep the world away from this. Better to share it with everyone, hehehehehe...

Since our previous night we couldn't grab some of the local food (we had to prioritize survival over other stuff and eat what a decent cooker would have called a bad joke), this time we had dinner at Mamakari-tei. The queen of the local food: sardines. And this restaurant conjugated them in all possible tenses: from raw to grilled, everything was possible in the menu. And you could see why the restaurant was famous in the area: a culinary pleasure. Plus, the decoration went with the ambience of Kurashiki: and old Japanese house, with the original wooden pillars and sober decoration. Unfortunately, there's always a but. And this one came with the cultural misunderstanding of the day:

Davide and Monika didn't want to eat the full sardine-course that the rest was eating. There was no problem regarding Monika's dish, but they didn't fully understand that in the case of Davide, and ordered for him a full course. The moment we realized, Davide had already eaten two of the dishes from the menu. We tried to explain the situation to the waiter, and he immediately understood it was his fault. But apparently the chef of the restaurant didn't care much, and wanted to force Davide pay for the whole course. It took us a lot of time to make him realize we were not going to let that happen, and he ended up really pissed off, but we managed to get away paying only the dishes he had ate. Anyway, we were all quite angry about the whole thing. A real pity, since I enjoyed a lot the meal and the place. What I found specially annoying about the whole issue was the attitude of the waiter. He wouldn't stop apologizing, yet you could clearly see he didn't give a damn about us paying for his mistake, and that all his apologies were just a cultural reflex. This is one of the most annoying aspects of the Japanese culture: when everything is fine, there's no problem. But if something turns out wrong, you will hear loads of apologies, but actually nothing will be done to try to amend the situation.

The entrance of the restaurant!

There was another waitress serving us. An old lady whose face was a poem when she saw us discussing, joking and making gestures about the whole affair. I think that at some point she got scared too, lol.

Sleep tight Ozzies!