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Bear Necessities of Life

Musings of Teddy Bear Necessity's Household
to Whom It May Concern
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Posted by スポンサードリンク
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Gion Festival, Kyoto


When Russell used to live in New York, he used to go to Japan once or twice a year on business and he then used to always include a weekend trip to Kyoto. However, even though he's been in Japan for almost a year now, he'd gone to Kyoto only ONCE--and that was just for one night--and so we decided it was time for him to take another trip down to this ancient city that he is so fond of. Incidentally it was the time of the Gion Festival, which is Kyoto’s famous summer festival started in 869 A.D. to plead for a divine intervention to stop a particularly terrible plague that was devastating the city at the time.



The festivities for the Gion Festival last entire July, but the biggest event is held in the morning of 17th, when 32 highly decorated wooden floats, each representing a certain district in the city and some theme that’s relating to the festival, parade around the city. Some decorations are national treasures that are hundreds of years old, and so this festival is also sometimes referred to as the “movable museum.” Some floats are up to 25 meters long and weighs about 12 tons. All the floats are either pulled or carried by volunteers from the respective district, and there are always some foreign volunteers who join in the festivity so that they can have the most intimate cultural experience.

On that weekend at night, you can see the wooden floats scattered around the city for close viewing. On Saturday night, the number of visitors reached 150,000.

Kyoto summer is incredibly hot because the city is situated in a valley. The heat and the crowd utterly exhausted us, so we quickly retreated back to Gion to hang out with "maiko," apprentice geisha. These girls have just started (left one for 3 months and right one for 3 weeks), so Russell felt funny about asking their age. Being in his 30s and American, he feels strange about hanging out with people who are obviously teenagers. Well, it's cultural, not criminal, really!



Next day, dressed in "yukata," traditional Japanese summer casual wear, we ventured out to "Arashiyama," countryside of Kyoto near the mountain to eat the river fish, ayu.






Because ayu lives in the clean mountain spring and eats moss in the river, raw ayu smells like a watermelon. I'm not kidding. It does NOT smell like fish at all, and if it does, I don’t think you should eat it. The most delicious way to eat, I find, is grilling it, and you eat the whole thing, including the head and tail. Yum!





Kyoto is only 2+ hours away from Tokyo by a bullet train. It's an easy and comfortable ride. I wonder why we don't go there more often.
Posted by teddydale
2-legged Musings / 10:58 / comments(0) / trackbacks(0)