Kyoto Photo Blog

A few more photos from our painfully brief stay in Kyoto this summer...



Fushimi Inari Taisha



Hand-washing basins are part of the symbolic purification before entering the shrine. They also provide exceptional photo ops as they typically combine water, stone, wood, and light.







Fushimi Inari features a four kilometer hike up a trail arched with orange tori. An absolute must-see in Kyoto any time of year.








Kiyomizu-Dera -- Pure Water Temple



Watching other gaijin make a scene never gets old. This French guy and his buddies were doing a martial arts photo shoot in front of the main gate at Kiyomizu-Dera.



Japanese joinery is the best way to earth-quake proof your ancient wooden structure.



The Kiyomizu spring is renown for the purity of its water. Take a sip! It's lucky!







Sprucing up the temple grounds in preparation for Matsuri.


Tea house with a fantastic view.


Kinkakuji -- The Golden Pavilion



Kinkakuji and the surrounding gardens are a perfect place to go when you have a long afternoon to spend in quiet, reflective solitude. It loses a bit of its luster when you're corralling teenagers, but I was able to wander off on my own for a few minutes and enjoy a brief shot of the stillness.



Wrap it all up with a cold brew in a cozy bar, and you've got the perfect day.

Returning to Japan: Kyoto

I've been spending quite a bit of time lately talking to my little German brother, Steven, who left his life in Mannheim for a year to come to the US. After a few months back home, he's discovering what I found when I moved home from Japan. When you drop your whole life to immerse yourself in a new experience -- a school, a job, a journey -- it comes at a price. The friends you make in your new locale aren't there to bolster you up when you get home, and the time away has distanced you so completely from your old friends that they are worse than strangers. Steven's life, like mine, is now gloriously shattered by the social San Andreas of "living abroad."



We all compartmentalize our lives: work, friends, relationships, family, that crazy summer with the traveling circus; but in normal, healthy lives, we have cross-over. Our coworkers meet our friends who hang out with our boyfriends who make awkward appearances at family gatherings and so forth. Those subtle links bind our experiences together into one collective mass we call: Life. Without them, we become scattered, disjointed; instead of being multifaceted, we become multi-lived. The problem with Dissociative Life Disorder is that whatever side of your life you happen to be on becomes dominant, reducing its counterpart to that slippery, half-imagined state of dreams. Kind of like the way we all felt about Top Gun after this.



Returning to Kyoto this summer, I was a bit apprehensive. I had been away for three years, and in that time, I wasn't sure how much I had romanticized my experiences there. Kyoto was the epicenter of my life in Japan -- not just a city where I lived, but a city where I fell madly and irredeemably in love. In love with the play of light on the Kawaramachi; with the clatter of bamboo in the wind; with narrow, snaking alleyways and a thousand little bridges; with the startling white glide of a crane; with soaring orange tori and ten-story buildings dripping with neon; with the lullaby rock of subway trains; with 7-Eleven sushi and one very well-worn blue sweater. In love with a lifestyle, with a rhythm, with an aesthetic, with a man. I was afraid that returning to Kyoto might shatter its magic for me -- might flip the garish house lights on after an enchanting show.



Instead, I discovered that even my most vivid memories didn't do any more justice to this incredible city than snapshots do to a mountain range.



Kyoto embodies the best of Japan -- a deep reverence for tradition interlaced with freshness and vitality; a startling juxtaposition of nature's stillness and the steady urban buzz; a cultural character that is rich, unique, and always surprising.



I should not have worried about Kyoto disappointing me. Coming back was like coming home, not just in the familiarity of the winding streets (a maze I long ago committed to memory) but because the rhythm of the place was once the rhythm of my life, the way an old song always takes us back to ourselves. I felt this way as my students and I entered Fushimi-Inari and as we made the steep climb up to Kyomizu-dera, but more than ever I felt myself coming home in the fervent embraces of old friends, in an icy beer and a bowl of edamame, in a smokey bar at three a.m., and in the well-worn, quiet comfort of friendship that time cannot fade.

Keeping the Adventure Alive

When I was preparing for my blind leap into the Land of the Rising Sun, my mother had two reservations:

1) She was a little bit nervous about her innocent baby flying to the other side of the globe, into a foreign culture, with no knowledge of the language or customs, to a town she'd never heard of, with a somewhat sketchy job, all alone, for an indefinite amount of time.

2) She'd never gotten the chance to do something cool like that.

Before I moved overseas, I had always been a bit shy, a bit on the fringe of things. Some of my friends would strongly disagree with this, but they are only my most intimate of friends. The average classmate or coworker of mine knew little to nothing about me and had probably never had a conversation with me.

Then I moved to Japan.

Part of my motivation for going overseas was the need to stretch my wings. You know the feeling you get in your legs if you sit in a cramped back seat of a car for too long? That feeling that makes you want to do jumping jacks and run around in circles? It was like that, only it wasn't in my legs; it was in my whole life.

So I stretched.

I don't think I really noticed the change 'til one day i was at Starbucks with Don (our usual pre-work ritual) and he asked me a funny question: "So what's it like to be the only girl in the office?"

"I'm not the only girl in the office."

"Yeah, you are."

"No... there's Erica, and both our bosses, and the Japanese staff... There are lots of girls in the office."

"All right... What's it like to be the only hot girl in the office?"

"What?! Just drink your coffee."

This very brief conversation led to deeper contemplation on my part and, eventually, to a total paradigm shift. It was true -- looks aside -- I was the only girl in the office who ever did anything. because I wasn't particularly attached to my roommates, I was out with guys from the office every night -- 80s night once a month at The Metro; fish & chips at the pub; Bruce Lee movie nights; nabe parties; discovering new hole-in-the-wall bars in Shi-jo; karaoke marathons 'til 4 a.m.; Christmas caroling (my god, whose idea was that?!); a thousand beers in dimly lit izakaya; loitering around San-jo bridge when we couldn't afford anything else; and train beers every single night after work. Inintentionally and for the first time in my life, I was right in the hub of the social scene.

For the most part, this was due to the perfect balance of yin and yang that was my friendship with Don. No one alive is more unlike me than Don. We were therefore an inseparable and flawless team. He hatched a scheme, I hopped on board, and in three seconds flat, the shenanigans were in full swing and anybody who was anybody was with us -- the idea man and his hot sidekick makin' the magic happen.

Don is going to hell for being irreverent at the Kobe earthquake memorials... and several similar offenses. I'm going to hell for laughing.

You can imagine my dismay when I got home and had no Don and therefore nothing to do. Nothing to do. I now have to create all the trouble I get into on my own, which is an awful lot of work.

However, one thing I did decide was that I needed to share the new, adventurous me with my mom, who doesn't think she is adventurous at all. Today, my mom and I went white-water rafting for seventeen miles down the Hudson river. Seventeen miles. Go, mom!

:-)

Carving a Niche

Apartment living here, there, and everywhere

My friend Josh (or "Tasmanian Josh" as I usually call him when telling stories about him) just moved from his little apartment in Shiga to a littler one in Osaka. This is the first time he's been living on his own -- no family, no roomies, no nobody. The place was completely empty, so he had to go out and do a little shopping. For the first time in his life, he now owns an ironing board.

They grow up so fast, don't they?

My first apartment in Japan was sublet by my company, way out in the middle of nowhere. I was a forty-five minute walk from the train station, grocery store, pay phone, etc. and the rent was outrageous. But on the plus side, I had sliding glass doors that led to my tatami-floored bedroom where I slept on a futon on the floor. It was all very Japanesey. (See below, left.) After a brief spell there, I couldn't handle the commute or the rent anymore, so I moved into Yamashina, a suburb of Kyoto, and lived in a much older, much more genuinely Japanese home (below, right).

If there's any doubt in your heart as to which place was more traditionally Japanese, take a quick gander at the toilets and you'll figure it out...

In both these places, I had roommates. In the apartment, she was a very cranky Aussie -- actually the only cranky Aussie I know; most of them are absolute stars -- and I was glad to get away from her when I moved. The girls in the other house were more laid back, but we didn't ever become very close as I spent most of my free time with people from my office. These roommates also worked in Kyoto, whereas my friends and I worked in the more rural Shiga, so our social circles were a little different. Still, we co-existed peacefully enough and it was with great sadness that I left our little tile-roofed, tatami-floored domicile.

Once I had secured a job here at home, I needed to get out of my parents' house. I love my parents very deeply, but living seven thousand miles away from them and then moving back in was absolutely un-rock. I started apartment-hunting via the internets (mostly the big one). I'd been sitting in one coffee shop all summer filling out job applications and it actually made me sick to my stomach to go in there, so I changed locales to a little bookstore downtown. My friend Sisi, who is the most organized and systematic person I have ever known, came with me and made pro/con lists and did math involving rent rates, utilities, and other facets of my financial life.

Sisi was extremely helpful and after exploring several different options, we found a great little place. Highlights: it's well within my price range; as long as he behaves, I can keep my cat, Benedick, here; I'm allowed to paint the walls; and none of the neighbors seem to be crack addicts, or at least, they're very quiet crack addicts.

Ben chillaxin' in our new pad

I didn't go out and buy an ironing board (I stole an old one of my brother's instead -- he has a wife now; he doesn't iron), but nothing makes you feel all grown up quite as much as living alone.

Wasting Away

Many factors, both personal and professional, influenced the timing of my return to the US. It's no secret that our economy is in a bit of a shambles, and teaching jobs are hard to come by. You can get a job pretty easily if you're willing to move out into the foothills of Tennessee or to a dark alley somewhere in New York, but why risk your health when you can move abroad and get a cushy chain-school job instead?

After several months in Japan, I heard a rumor that a position was opening up at my alma mater -- a bit rough around the edges at times, but a good school, close to my family and willing to pay me well. I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I had been planning a visit home anyway because one of my brothers was getting married, so I simply put in my notice at the chain-school and changed my round-trip ticket to one-way.

Well, it wasn't really that simple.

Moving anywhere, especially alone, is always a return to square one. You wipe out every aspect of your daily life and start building something new. I knew that would be the case when I moved to Japan, but I was surprised to find that startling sensation of the Blank Slate was even worse coming home, perhaps because it was unexpected.

My friends in Japan were a tight-knit group, boisterous and spontaneous and utterly free from self-consciousness and responsibility. I reluctantly left them behind and returned home to find that nearly everyone I knew had moved away or gotten married and dropped off the social radar. My parents were in town, but my brothers and sister were out carving their own niches in the world. My British boyfriend, who had originally talked about joining me in the States once he got the paperwork sorted out, ran into a million frustrations trying to get a visa. Combine that with the toll the distance took on our relationship, and we went down like a sumo wrestler made of nato and chopsticks. To top off the loneliness and listlessness I felt, the job I had come home for dissolved into legend. Perfect.

It is a well-known fact in life: if you are happy, stay where you are. Stirring things up will only leave you wishing you hadn't.

The Intro

All this happened, more or less...

I'm a teacher, sort of. Don't get me wrong -- by "sort of," I don't mean I'm that weirdo teacher you had for American history with the gigantic pink lips who pronounced Illinois "ill a noise." I'm a good teacher. And I'm frickin' hip.

I'm just not a lifer. This is one of many adventures I'm passing through.

My last adventure was to pack a bag after my college graduation and move to Japan. Lots of people from home acted like this was special, but if you do a quick blog search for something like "teaching in Japan" or "foreigner in Japan" or I''m a gaijin," you'll see that practically everybody and his red-headed cousin has lived in Japan. This is a good thing. I love Japan and I'm down with anybody who wants to live there or visit there or sit at home and have a vicarious gaijin experience through his red-headed cousin's blog.


However, what's unique about my experience is that... well, it's over. And now I'm back home trying to re-acclimate to the U.S. of A. I thought this would be a fairly quick and comfortable transition, like sliding back into bed after a shivery midnight jaunt to the toire. Turns out, it's more like crawling back into the womb. I'll let you think about that analogy for second...

The web is well supplied with blogs about living abroad. This is a blog about trying to come home.

Kansai at dusk