Let’s Goyang!

Stare at this feature for awhile and you WILL want to go pee…

The Japanese are a superstitious lot. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with their religion, but man, the temples do make quite abit of income from them.

For a fee, you can have your fortune told, and you can also pray. They have different altars for praying for different things - after a small donation of course. And if you touch certain objects / statues, you can have your wish granted.

OR… you can even complete challenges - like blind-folding yourself and walking from one stone to another (about 100m away down some stairs) to obtain your soulmate.

But let me tell you, tempted as I was - the chances of me straying off the route and walking off the cliff or falling down the stairs was extremely high. I reckon if you actually successfully complete this challenge unharmed - you’re not only gonna get a soulmate, you’ll achieve GOD status.

Or if all that isn’t enough for you and you want to be sure you’ll find a soulmate - just buy a love charm. They’re sold everywhere.

And they aren’t just limited to love charms. There are charms for everything! Because it was the school-trip season, and many students were expected, the main charms on display were for success in exams, studies, and crushes . Awww…

And the hundreds of students there were clamoring for them!

After that, we made our way to another famous site called the Kinkakuji temple - more famously known as the Golden Pavillion Temple. The building is finished with real solid gold! Before being converted into a temple by his own son, it was orginally built by a Shogun as his retirement villa. You know how it is with rulers - they build rediculously useless and ‘bling’ stuff for their own ego.

We have the same thing here in Malaysia. Its called the Petronas Twin Dildos Towers.

From there, we headed to the extremely famous Ryoan-ji temple - home of the Zen rock garden. Nobody knows for sure what the garden means or represents. There are thousands of theories. But according to the designer, its actually extremely simple. Only the most senior of monks at this temple know the secret behind the rock garden.

The garden looks alot smaller than it actually is. Because of some optical illusion thingy with the walls - part of the designer’s plan.

So what do people here do when they see this?

They sit down, stare at the garden, and contemplate it’s meaning.

I’m serious.

I sat there for a good 15 minutes! And went away completely clueless…

But after all the temples - I felt completely pure and at peace! Than it was time for some shopping. To bring back my blood-thirsty self, guess what I bought?

Yea… going through customs in Malaysia was a real bitch! I’ll say this much… I’m really not proud of the fact that a bribe-opportunity was offered to me by the customs officer. But what could I do? As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t have a choice.

Anyways, after sword-shopping, it was time for alcohol shopping! Kyoto is famous for its sake’. So I had to bring some back.

Despite everything in Japan being quite abit more expensive than Malaysia. Its great to know that alcohol here is sssoooo much cheaper!

After a sushi dinner (with some really weird raw stuff) and drinks at a bar, I headed back to Osaka at about Midnight.

But man, even as I write this, I’m missing Kyoto. I love the place! I can’t wait to go back there.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Tripping Overseas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.