Lately I’ve had the pleasure of catching up with various friends during their various visits here. I’ve been very fortunate that schedules have matched up nicely enough to give me enough time to show them around Kyoto at various points.
It’s hard to know what to follow up an emotionally charged entry with. So I’ll just throw a bunch of stuff at you to see what sticks. The first part of the title of this post may seem misleading, but actually its exactly on point.
Yep. Please announce, yo! As long as we’re on the topic of surreal translations into English mounted upon the walls of convenience store toilets (because that’s legitimately a topic, you see) here’s some more to digest.
What on earth is ‘brush lust’? Or is is ‘brush just’? Either one is more confusing than the last to try and unpack the unintentional Dadaist form. That’s before we even reach the somewhat ominous tone of “It is anxious when it thinks.” way to give a person pre-shit anxiety, thus holding up the queue forming outside the door.
Perhaps I should institute a policy on this blog that all future comments be written in the form of an “unreserved built-in opinion note”. That means, in a manner of speaking, write whatever you like because I sure as heck don’t know what an “unreserved built-in opinion note” actually is, but it just sounds so damn cool.
I’ve had more nabe in the past six weeks than I have had in my entire life. Nabe, for the uninitiated, is kind of like Japanese hot pot but with a variety of different soup bases and ingredients. Here’s a few pictures.
Kimchi Pork Nabe:
Tomato Nabe:
Seafood Nabe:
I’ve also been lucky enough to try crab and miso based varieties of nabe. Enough about nabe, because I’m making myself hungry.
Other things… I know I’ve taken some time off here from writing and posting weekly, but that doesn’t mean I’ve actually been taking time off from writing. I’ve written an article or two and have been fiddling about with some larger projects I have in mind.
I experienced snow for the first time in my life. It was amazing for a few minutes, then I shifted straight back to “HOLY SHIT IT IS COLD IN KYOTO RIGHT NOW” mode. And since then, Kyoto has kind of been ‘teasing’ snow for the better part of the last month. When you think it is going to start falling heavy, it stops. When you decide, “I know, I’ll go into this bar for a little while so when I come out it will be a wintery wonderland!” It never comes true. Yet it remains colder than communication with an ex.
As recently as this week, I’ve also been to my first Setsubun festival.
Setsubun festivals are hard to describe. Imagine yourself at a shrine. A ritual takes place in which beans are thrown to ward off devils and evil spirits. Then said beans (and other gifts) are thrown at people who attended the festival to award them with good luck for the next year.
Now imagine 200 or so people clamoring for beans, mochi, super bouncy balls, packets of chips and various other things as they’re being hurled at you by monks standing on the platform surrounding a shrine. There’s even a lottery you can buy into (500Y) where you can win a variety of prizes. I managed to come away with a win, oddly enough, and a stack of goodies.
My only question now is – where can I go to get some monk bingo action?
Another day in January was spent watching Rakugo, traditional Japanese comedy in the form of stories. There were nine performers in total, all talented to various degrees, but I was lucky to understand about 15% of what was going on. Some of the stories included a man reluctant to try fugu (puffer fish), a woman who kept overpaying for noodles and a man who recreated the story of Cinderella using cardboard cutouts where he played all characters. It’s a very interesting art form, because there are numerous ways to tell any story, which is where the skill of the performer is important. The skill of the performer is basically the reason why the story is a hit or a miss.
By about the 6th performer, my brain just went into shutdown mode. I overloaded it by focusing very hard on what was going on, even though I was lucky to understand what I did. Once Rakugo had finished, drunken antics could commence. The area we were in is home to the largest shotengai (undercover shopping arcade) in Japan, so there were two or three places we dropped into to imbibe and gorge ourselves.
That’s about all for now. More madness to be written about in the coming weeks.