Kyoto

Kyoto is a beautiful city, and for that reason alone should be remembered as more than The Place Where Tim Shaved His Head. Coming from the bustling industry of Osaka, the slower pace of Kyoto is very apparent.  That isn't to say that people don't work hard for very long hours in Kyoto, it's just that they seem to do it while steeped in the underlying spirituality of the city.  It is a place of temples, thousands of them, and they are clearly more than just tourist attractions to the city's population. Unfortunately, no picture I could take could convey that feeling, so I can only suggest that you visit Kyoto and walk its streets for yourself.  In the meantime, I've included some rather worldly and comparably mundane pictures on this page.

There is a lot of interesting, almost abstract art in Kyoto.  Most of it is at or near temples.

Sitting right next to the other sculpture as it was, we weren't quite sure if this was art or botany.  Mom had a go at lifting up some of the straw wrapping, but we still weren't sure;  Fortunately a helpful shuttle bus driver happened by and pantomimed for us that it was a tree that was from a warmer climate and had been wrapped up for the winter.

This is where a side canal comes into the main river in Kyoto.  I don't actually know the purpose of these baffles, but they made a nice picture.

This is a bizarre one.  Basically it is a suspended gutter, carrying the street runoff across the canal -- but you have to ask:  where to, exactly?  Why doesn't it empty directly into the canal?

It took me a while to figure out why I liked this building so much.  Now that I've figured it out, it's hard for me to believe that it wasn't done on purpose. The bottom outcropping is a bowtie, the middle a chin, and the top is two eyes with a very long drooping nose.

I'd never seen this combination of stairs and slide before.  Very cool.

This is an interesting example of "the right amount of space" in Japan.  Notice how evenly spaced the groups are along the water edge -- it's the exact same distance between groups, and the pattern was repeated on both sides of the river as far as the eye could see. There were no natural or artificial landmarks -- people were just sitting comfortably far apart (or comfortably near together, depending on your perspsective).

The Japanese believe in above ground wiring, and their streets and alleys tend to have these extensive webs of power and telepohone connections running along them.  You almost never see this in the U.S. these days -- it's all underground.

I was grossly misled about the variety of vending machines in Japan.  While there are literally about a thousand times more machines around (think every street corner) they are virtually all for drinks, with the occasional ice cream machine thrown in.  This is the only one I've found so far selling anything else.

I'm not sure exactly what they're advertising here, but I think we can all agree that after is better than before.

Construction equipment in Japan tends to be lavender and/or blue.  Very little of that garish yellow stuff....

Yes, this place served pork.  Move along.

This fascinating lists of things you're not supposed to do comes from the top of Kyoto station.  Among them:  no turning into a bird, and no being a small exploding cube.