2004may25. I’m in Kyoto, Japan, being polite. My limited knowledge of Katakana is helping a little bit, but when I get to a temple, it’s pretty much all Kanji and nothing is translated. The temples are riddled with small tourist trinket stations, a lot of them repeat in case you were walking by too fast the first two times. I got a good luck charm for TRAVEL SAFETY (which of course had little cartoon representations of all the major forms of transporation currently popular with the “in” crowd) but I don’t know if I’m supposed to keep it with me, eat it, or dangle it over my head.
The major two food groups of visitors to the temples and other tourist attractions are single women, and schoolchildren. Boatloads of schoolchildren, all dressed like sailors. Schoolchildren in Japan are never actually in the classroom, they just tour Japan all year. At least that’s what a totally mythical tour guide told me as I bashed my head against the top of the nth small temple doorway that day.