Into the Black City

 My last spring break as a teacher (at least for a good long while) is over.  On one hand, this means that I won't have to experience the way a week can stretch infinitely at the end of a quarter while you pray you survive long enough to be free of the children for at least a few short days of travel.  On the other hand, it means I'm going to be too broke to actually have a few short days of travel...unless I break my piggy bank.  This is something that I'm trying to avoid, but after a year Stateside I may be desperate enough.  I have hope that Minneapolis will be lively enough to keep me from noticing all the places I haven't gone.

Ever since the Evil One moved to Armenia I've been intending to go visit.  After all, we were practically neighbors...or so I told myself.*  I was aware, on some level, that it was trickier to get to the other end of central Asia than I was telling myself, since Her Evilness and co. came to visit two years ago, but you have to actually EXPERIENCE it to realize the truth.  I've said it before.  I'll say it again, especially since it may be the last time I do so for two years: getting there is NOT half the fun.  See, flights into Yerevan are sporadic.  What the Evil One did - and what she suggested to me - was to fly through Istanbul into Tblisi, which is in Georgia.  Four hours away from Yerevan.  Which either meant another flight - if there was one when I needed it (there wasn't) or ground transportation.  She suggested a taxi.  I said a bus was fine (I am not living on a state department salary, after all).  And then she booked and paid for a taxi anyways, and had it take me directly to Gyumri - the first place that I mentioned wanting to visit - and met me there, claiming that it made it easier for her (because it did - no worrying about me while also avoiding a 8-hour drive round trip).

I was struck pretty hard through the drive by how similar Georgia (and later Armenia) felt.  Topographically as well as the nature and some of the buildings gave me the impression that Mongolia and Greece got together and had a love child, then gave it to Russia to raise.  My driver rushed along nice, smooth roads til we got to the border crossing - I think my fifth time crossing by land.**  Since these days we mostly travel internationally by plane, it's easy to forget that you typically have to pass immigration twice - as a departure and as an arrival - but it was kind of a trip to be dropped off by the driver, walk through Georgian immigration just a few hours after they stamped my passport at the airport, drive over a river, get out and walk through Armenian immigration with my luggage, because this time I also had to go through customs.  Not my weirdest land crossing, but definitely interesting.

The taxi made a brief stop for food (ie, snacks) and the bathroom just past the border, and then we wound through a canyon pretty much all the way to Gyumri, another 3 hours.  The views were stunning and bleak by turns - I would have loved to make the driver stop at several points for photos, but since he was getting paid as a taxi driver, not a tour driver, I went easy on him.  

Finally I made it to the old town, where the Evil One had booked us into the Grand Apricot hotel.  She and her spawn came out and retrieved me from the driver and escorted me along a walking street before giving me the "grand tour" of my hotel room, which had been ransacked for pillows by the Lesser of Two Evils.  After a short break, we all went out wandering.

The Armenians are amazing stone workers, and if I'd had more time, I would have taken her Evilness up on the offer to find me a carving class to take.  Instead, I just had to admire it and take photos ad nauseum.  The stone many of the buildings and carvings are made from is called tuff, a kind of sedimentary stone made from volcanic ash.  Apparently the city planners of Gyumri - formerly known as Aleksandropol - had an emo streak, because they primarily used the black tuff for their masonry.  And since I have a bit of an emo streak myself, of course I loved it...now I just have to figure out how to work it into a piece (maybe embossed paper???)

My first morning in Armenia I woke up bright and early for the thing that had brought me to Gyumri - dolls.  Of course.  The Family Evil slept in while I walked past churches to buy a loaf of bread and sit in the fresh morning air eating a snack, then wandered the rest of the way over to Naro Dolls.

It was a little off the beaten track, but 100% worth it!  I loved meeting another craftsman - she hand sews and stuffs the dolls, using some cloth accessories as well as the painting.  She even had a "big sister" doll based on the same design that I chose, which I really loved.  Although it was different from the dolls I usually make, it was fun and I learned a new technique for the hair that I might have to try with my own dolls someday.  And her hospitality was so sweet - when I told her I didn't drink coffee or tea, instead she brought me a cup of water in one of Gyumri's special crafts - a metal cup that sings!  It was a pretty long workshop, and by the time Anahid (as Evil named her) was finished, it was about lunch time, so I got to try my first lavash, too, and it was delicious.

Finally I headed back to the hotel to force the sleepyheads to get moving.  It was Evil's birthday, after all, so even if a lie-in was called for, we definitely needed to go see something.  We discussed what we should do next, and after wandering a bit ended up at the Black Fortress.

Once upon a time, of course, it was an actual military fortification.  The hill it sits on gives a strong advantage, with views of the countryside (ie, the Turkish border) all around...not to mention a lot of steps, if you count that sort of thing.  But these days, it's used primarily for performances.  I checked out the acoustics, much to the mortification of the Lesser of Two Evils, who refused to sing songs from Frozen with me, even though we were about the only people there.  As we were about to leave, the caretaker came and offered to show us the museum, as well - apparently it kind of opens on an as-needed basis.  We also got a nice view of Gyumri's Mother Armenia statue.

And that was about it.  The next day, we visited the Museum of the Two Sisters - an art museum showcasing the work of two women from Gyumri - and stopped at HayAr jewelry on our way out of town, where I got to buy a beautiful pomegranate necklace made of recycled bullet casings.  Then we were on our way to Yerevan.

*Yes, we physically lived closer to one another her first go-round - her in India, me in the Emirates - but Mongolia and Armenia feel closer on a mental level.  Yes, my brain is a crazy, crazy place.

**I've also crossed US-Canada in 1989, South-North Korea in 2007, Greece-Turkey in 2008, and China-Nepal in 2013

Beyond the Bucket List

I assume you've heard the term bucket list before.  It's a phrase that implies there are things you HAVE to see, generally before you kick the bucket, but people also use it for singular trips.  The bucket list of things you have to do when you visit Japan, for example.  The thing is, I don't actually like this term.  Maybe I'm too old for it - in a way similar to the fact that I'm too old to really understand bullet journals (they happened after my time, yo) - but I think the bigger problem is that they deny the reality that there are layers and layers of possibilities in every trip.

I'd been resisting the pull of Japan since leaving, telling myself that I needed to buckle down and save up before I went back, because when I went back I was going to DO ALL THE THINGS!  I'd like to say that this was very practical of me, and applaud myself for not giving in to temptation...but I'm not really a very practical person.  As you know by now if you read my last post, my resolve broke about a month ago, and I started thinking about what else I could do in my favorite city in Japan.

See, my first go-round was all about geisha, shrines, and castles.  My focus shifted before I came back three years ago, when I went to about a bajillion festivals and art workshops.  Last fall I planned my trip around art exhibits and yokai hunting.  But the thing is there is ALWAYS something else to do there.  For example, the Ningyo Kuyo at Hokyo-Ji.  I've been wanting to come to this ceremony since I first learned that doll memorials were a thing in Japan, and this time the dates finally lined up.  I went to the Ningyou Kanshasai at Meiji Jingu, but this was completely different - more intimate and ceremonial.  Hokyo-Ji is a Buddhist nunnery temple where the head priestess was traditionally an imperial princess.  Normally they hold the ceremony outside, but since it was kind of rainy, we were gathered on the porch of the garden.  I ended up with front row "seats" - before it started they ushered all the foreigners to sit on tatami mats on the left side of the ceremony - and although it was a struggle to stay awake after about five minutes of chanting while different VIPs made their presentations, I was rewarded in the end with a musical performance (how much do I miss taiko?  SO much) and maiko dances.  Sadly I still haven't gotten to see the funeral pyre, but I guess that's just another reason to go back - I hear Tokorozawa holds one in June...

Another temple I neglected on past trips was Kosan-Ji.  This is where the Choujuu-Giga - a series of scrolls depicting animals doing wild and crazy things - were created.  They're often considered the earliest manga, and although I'd wanted to see where they came from the last time I was in Kyoto, there's never enough time to do everything.

From a subway station near my hotel I could take one bus all the way to the temple parking lot, so it seemed like the time was right to finally make it.  Actually finding the bus was the hardest part - it was one of those pesky JR buses that doesn't have a number, and as much as I love Google maps, they still haven't figured out bus stops.  The temple was beautiful, and walking across its wooden floors in my sock feet as I soaked up the sun was relaxing.  But its best feature was probably how it demonstrates one of the things I love the most about this place.  Kyoto is definitely a city, but all along its fringes are these beautiful bits of nature - mountains, forests, a lake.  I've said it so many times that it hardly bears repeating:  I'm a city girl through and through.  But I grew up in the country, and I've lived in Mongolia so many years that I also enjoy leaving civilization behind every once in a while.  Kyoto gives you both.

I steered clear of art museums this time but found more than enough art along my way.  I stumbled across yet another Zen Buddhist temple as I was cycling around Gion on my fifth day, Kennin-Ji.  I decided to go in on a whim - I needed to park my bike somewhere, since I was thinking about getting some ties cut that morning and Yasui Konpiragu doesn't have bike parking - but it turned out to be a serendipitous whim.  I was struck immediately by the beauty of the gardens, most likely because I've been building one in which to display my sacred relics.  If anything, I guess that was the driving force behind a lot of the sightseeing I did during this trip - later the same day I went to Eikan-Do specifically to see their gardens.

But Kennin-Ji also had some great art.  They had screens of Fuujin and Raijin - gods of wind and lightning - possibly the originals, since they seemed to be selling an awful lot of swag featuring them.  But they also had an incredibly beautiful contemporary sumi-e painting of twin dragons in the main prayer hall, done to commemorate the 800th anniversary of their founding.  When I left the temple, I felt like I'd done my professional development for the week, and felt just that much less guilty about wasting time on shopping.

I did not, though, end up going to Yasui Konpiragu afterwards.  See, in addition to a shit ton of shopping and hanging out with my padawan, I was looking forward to some quality time with Sensei, who turned out to be on vacation the same week as me, and announced that she'd be coming through Kyoto on her way back from Shikoku after I booked my ticket.  I realized that she was the perfect person to go with to get my ties cut.  See, Yasui Konpiragu's kamisama is famous for cutting ties with prejudice, and after getting yet another email from our favorite cyberstalker, I figured I could use a good tie-cutting.  Afterwards we wandered up to Yasaka Jinja, and then back toward Sanjo where her hotel was, stopping at Red Rock for lunch.  I hadn't realized til I saw her how much I missed her.

After a full day of shopping in Osaka on Saturday, trying to scurry back to the hotel through the rain while protecting my treasures, I kind of just wanted to eat yakiniku and stay in for the rest of the night.  But there was one, last thing I had to do; after flopping on the bed for about a half hour, I realized I'd be pissed at myself if I missed it, so I blow-dried my clothes, trudged down to the bus stop, and embarked on my way to Taishogun Street.  I went there last fall to hunt yokai, but I missed the main event - the Hyakki Yagyu, or Night Parade of 100 Demons.  Given my own particular idiom, this was totally unacceptable, and since it was happening while I was there this time, I really had to make it.  The Japanese do cosplay like nobody else in the world, with the end result being that you really felt like you were mingling with myths on the street.  Eventually musicians joined us and began to play - oh my taiko! - and the ayakashi danced off into the night.

I continued down the street past the stalls of the Mononoke Ichi - a market selling yokai goods - just narrowly resisting the temptation to buy a paper kitsune lantern (it was 3,000 yen and I was already bringing back both kitsune AND a lantern, or else I might have succumbed).  Further on Daishogun Hachiman Jinja was lit up with lanterns and stalls selling food, and I couldn't resist the lure of one more kakigori before I left.  Everyone should be so lucky as to both start and end a week in Kyoto with a matsuri.

State of the Art

A week of teaching is a little like swimming to the bottom of a body of water.  It always feels a little chancy, and when you hit the bottom you still have to come back up before you get a nice lungful of air.  In this analogy, the weekend is the air I breathe.  Back in January that body of water was Lake Michigan.  It took forever to make it to the bottom, and by then I wasn't sure if I'd be alive still when I broke the surface.  By contrast, my weeks now mostly feel like the deep end of the old Glenwood city pool - I'm down and back before I have time to worry.

I started last week a little worried about my lung capacity.  My school was holding a PYP training, and if I had attended it, I'd currently be on my eighth day of a twelve day stretch - a dive to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench.  Since I'd already had that particular training, I begged out of it and ended up doing a different kind of professional development - attending the Tokyo Art Fair.  Once upon a time (about five and a half years ago) I wrote about the UB Art Fair, and how underwhelmed it left me.  I cited the Brookside and Plaza art fairs that I used to go to back in my college days.  Since writing it, I've realized that those KC art fairs would be considered as quaint to some people in the art world as the UB Art Fair seemed to me.  To the high rollers of the art world, those local artists were selling their pottery and photos for chump change.  Those guys look to catch bigger fish.

High rollers, of course, have a bigger buy-in.  When I first read about the Tokyo Art Fair, I was a little shocked to see admission was 3,500 yen (although you could get in for 3,000 if you bought in advance).  This very nearly made me fold; Japan isn't a cheap place to live on a good day, and my expenses here are much higher than ever before, except for possibly in those bygone college days.  Then I found out about a late pass, where you could get in for 90 minutes on Friday night for a single coin (one that is worth about $5...be careful giving your spare change away here!)  My friend Sensei helped me buy it, and at 6:30 Friday night I was heading through the doors.

Those high rollers were looking for investment pieces, works by artists with a certain amount of name recognition.  I saw a few of them - some Kusama, a few pop artists, including Lichtenstein, I think, Hokusai - but I didn't really spend much time on those (okay, mayyybe I stood in front of the Hokusai prints for a few minutes wishing I could buy one, but c'mon.  Hokusai!).  What I was hoping to see at the Tokyo art fair was works by Japanese artists.  Of course, I'm always on the lookout for artists who use that otaku aesthetic in their work, but since I began my painting lessons (which I'll write about someday.  Really, I will) I've been particularly on the lookout for examples of Nihonga art.

The art fair didn't disappoint in that respect.  Not all of the paintings that I admired were painted with mineral pigments, of course.  Being the weeb that I am, I enjoyed seeing the approach that these artists took with traditional Japanese subjects, regardless of the media they worked in.  My favorite by far was Shiki Taira's LoveX2 Youkai Show.  As I walked past the Art Gallery Natsume stall, I was struck by her paintings of youkai, Japanese demons...and then I saw that in one of them they were fighting with a figure - executed in the traditional style of Japanese portraits, who was, nonetheless, very clearly Dracula.  It was totally subarashii.  If I were still living my Mongolian high life, I probably would have had to buy it, but I had to be content with the exhibition catalog she gave me (and no, I didn't realize she was the artist at the time, or I probably would have devolved into a blithering fangirl).

There were plenty that I was able to recognize as Nihonga, though.  Most of them had what I'll call the "Panda effect" on me.  A few years back, I had an awesome student whose work made the self-esteem of a decent percentage of the class shrivel up and die.  I truly believe that art is a skill, not just a talent, but it is challenging to stay motivated when you realize exactly how far ahead of you another artist is.  After some of the setbacks I've faced in my second Nihonga painting, that is how these artworks made me feel.  At the same time, I had to admire the technical skill that went into them, especially since I am learning how difficult it is to use mineral pigments, which made me even more determined to continue my studies and make some kickass art.

What can I say?  I'm a walking contradiction.

The art didn't stop on Friday night, though.  The fair had several other components, including a hotel taken hostage by art, 3331 Chiyoda, and an award exhibition.  A combined ticket to get you into all of them goes for 5,000 yen, which was still too rich for my blood.  Art In Park Hotel, though, has a free preview section, and I thought long and hard about going to see that as well, but in the end, I only had time for one art show before my painting lesson on Saturday, and there was only one possibility for that.

Later this week I'll be taking my tenth graders out to learn a little more about architecture.  The Venice Biennale has an architecture exhibition, and the Japanese Pavilion has made it's way to Gallery MA in Roppongi for a show.  We've specifically been studying linear perspective, since I don't have a lot of space for 3-D work in my classroom.  The works in EN: art of Nexus, combine small architectural models and computer generated designs, which makes a great contrast to the art we've been making.  Another thing that I loved about it was the fact that the architects had used real case studies as the point of departure for their works.  I think I have a tendency, in my teaching, to leave the project too open-ended, allowing my kids to make the things they want, rather than giving them a problem and asking them to find a solution.  This is a positive in some cases, but looking at these models and reading about the solutions the artists came up with made me realize their critical thinking skills would be more developed if I sometimes set a problem instead.

Although I tend to play off my desire to live in Japan as the great otaku dream, it's weekends like this that remind me there was a lot more to my decision than that.  There are so many things that I can experience here as an artist and a teacher that even with my challenges it's more than worth it.

Taking Advice

When it comes to traveling, I have some pretty clear ideas about what I want to do.  That said, when I decided to come to Shikoku and see Nagoro...

...which didn't happen, btw.  Plans to visit the #1 thing I really wanted to see on my vacation - the creepy "scarecrow" village where an artist decided to replace all the people who died or left with lifesize dolls - got wrecked by a bloody landslide.  Which sucks the big one, but what can you do?

As I was saying, when I decided to come here my teacher friend, Sensei (that's a new nickname, for those of you keeping track), told me that she was actually from Shikoku.  I told her what I was planning and asked if she had any advice.  She put me in touch with her friend in Tokushima and suggested that instead of making Awa Ikeda my base camp for getting to Nagoro that I stay in Oboke.

Tokushima wasn't originally on my itinerary.  Honestly Shikoku seemed pretty expensive to get around as I was pre-navigating on Google Maps, and it turns out, it is.  Any express train costs twice as much to ride, and the route to get to Matsuyama, where I'd hop back over to Honshu, was already long enough.  But I really loved the idea of getting a little extra sightseeing done and meeting her friend, which is just as well since I didn't actually make it to Nagoro.  Takamatsu, on the other hand, was, but I didn't do much of anything there, except get up WAY too early and get the bus.  I just didn't feel like it.  Tokushima, though - I arrived around 8 in the morning but wasn't meeting Ikuko until 5, so I was going to need something to do.

So I get into town around 8.  It's a ghost town...in Tokyo, even though things aren't open, there's a sense of life.  Not so much in Tokushima.  After chucking my bag in a locker and deciding Lotteria's breakfast was not a suitable replacement for McDonald's, I decided to do a little wandering.  The only other person who was out on the streets was the guy banging on the window of the pachinko parlor 10 minutes before it opened (like, really?  You couldn't wait politely a little longer to get your fix?)  I've been traveling with my pocket router, so I looked at my options and decided to start with the Awa Odori Kaikan, for the simple reason that it opened first. 

I've seen the Awa Odori before, back in August in Koenji, so it made sense to me to check out the museum and learn a little more.  After wandering around the nearby shrines and temples, I went on in.  Unfortunately, almost all of the signage was in Japanese, so mostly I just looked at the pictures, of which they had an impressive array.   If I was interested in being a museum curator, I'd want to learn from the Japanese, because they've made it into an art.  Although the museum was small, it was very well presented and even without being able to read the labels I started to get an understanding of the history of the dance.

At 11 they had a performance which demonstrated some of the history of the dance, and included an audience participation bit.  They chose four audience members as the "star dancers" and - big surprise - guess who was one of them (hence the flowers).  Perks (?) of being the token foreigner in the audience, I guess.  It was a little embarrassing, but I got a headband out of it as a prize, and if I was Five, I'd subtract that from the cost of the ticket and call it good.

Sensei sent me a link for the Awa Jurobe puppet museum (let your friends know that you went to a doll memorial and are planning to visit a scarecrow village and they start to draw some conclusions), which has performances at 11 and 2 - but in the end, it didn't happen.  Google maps failed me again, not being able to tell me how to get there, so I went back to the train station and asked at the information center.  They gave me instructions on how to get there by bus, but when I figured out that I wouldn't be able to do both that AND the Naruto whirlpools, I knew what I was going to decide.

For the record, I didn't make this decision under the influence of my otaku tendencies.  Not entirely, at any rate...although it IS pretty cool to be able to say I passed under the real Great Naruto Bridge.  More importantly, my current work for my painting class deals with water, and I thought it would be excellent research to this phenomenon in real life.  Naruto is the closest point on Shikoku to Honshu, and when the tides of the Inland Sea and the Pacific Ocean are changing, they create some pretty kickass whirlpools.  It's safe to take a boat and take an up close look at them, so that's what I did.  I regret nothing.

Actually, I should have gone up on the bridge afterwards, but I was kind of tired.  I'd had enough Naruto for one day.

I considered staying in Tokushima a little later the next day so that I could see the puppets, but I decided to head onward early again.  Sensei had suggested the Iya Valley to me for several reasons, but it's vine bridges looked pretty damn amazing, so I wanted to make sure I saw at least the first one, Kazurabashi.  I got my first hint that my plans were not going to work out when I tried to get the bus to Oboke, and the lady at the bus depot told me, "No."  The train was running though, so I grabbed a ticket and hopped on (and then had to pay more because it was one of those damn limited express trains), and made it to Oboke with almost no problems.  Where I found out - once again - that the buses weren't running.  I looked at some of the tourist stuff they had in the station, and then got pulled into a conversation between two older Japanese ladies and one younger one, wanting to know where I was going and if I wanted to share a taxi there and back?

Well, of course I did!  My share was 1,000 yen each way, and maybe I had a little buyer's remorse because I was still thinking I'd make it to Nagoro the next day, but it was honestly worth it.

I don't know if I can really do the bridge justice - I mean, if you are an adrenaline junkie, this is the bridge for you.  In the first photo, that's my foot (if you can't tell by my trademark 5 yen Converse shoes.  I have been blessed with feet that are both long and wide and I still got nervous that my feet were going to plunge between the slats.  That was what got me - I knew the bridge had been reinforced with steel cables, and it wasn't going to break, but those gaps...  About halfway across someone seemed to be shaking the bridge.  Maybe it was just a physics thing, where that's the least stable part of the bridge and you feel every footstep...I'm not sure, but it felt, at least, like someone was trying for the dickhead of the year award.  I was too busy watching my feet to try and figure out who, which I guess is a good thing, because I probably would've pitched their asses off the bridge.

Right as Rain

If you were to lay this year's fall break out side by side with last year's, you'd probably notice I'm a lot less busy.  I think living in Japan makes it a lot less pressing to SEE ALL THE THINGS - a year ago, as much as I was hoping to be here now, I had no guarantee.  I also think there's a bit of holdout from years of living in Mongolia - to an extent, the journey is the destination, otherwise you might feel a little cheated after driving for hours or even days just to see one thing, like a lake full of swans.  As I rolled down the track yesterday morning, taking the local train because the price doubles for the rapid express and I've got more time than money this year, I was alternately lost in Kafka on the Shore, jotting down notes because I wasn't sure when my laptop would cooperate, and enjoying the scenery of a clear morning as we passed country towns.  It was a nice change of pace.

Sunday, as I mentioned yesterday, was squishy and wet.  After the art exhibition, I put off walking in the rain as long as I could.  I visited Okayama's Animate, which required me to go through three floors of Don Quixote.  Usually I'm ready to run screaming five steps into the door - it's a kind of discount crap shop, and can be kind of overwhelming - but this time I actually spent a little time checking it out (if you're wondering about that section behind the curtain, it's exactly what you thought it was).  I stopped for lunch because I stumbled across Coco Curry, and then finally had to face facts: the rain was not going to stop.  I was going to have to suck it up and get wet.

I took the tram east from the station a few stops, and followed the stairs into an underground arcade that seemed like it could have been lifted from a Murakami novel.  I followed the signs for Okayama castle back upstairs and then uphill.  The last time I visited a castle it was raining too, albeit harder.  Then Five and I were more interested in getting back to Osaka and drying off than going inside.  This time I probably would have sprung for the admission fee just to dry out a little, but if it was open I didn't find the entrance.  There's a nice garden close by that is apparently one of the top gardens in Japan, but it's kind of hard to enjoy the beauty of nature when you feel like a drowned rat, so I headed back to the station.

Remember how I started this post by talking about how I am less "busy" during this vacation?  Well, it is true, but that doesn't mean I want to waste it.  After the castle, my shoes were already soaked and I couldn't check into the guesthouse until after 4 regardless, so I decided, what the hell, let's visit a shrine!  There was probably a reason why I singled out Kibitsu-jinja as the one to visit, but at the moment, I have no idea what it was.  One thing it had in its favor, when I arrived, was that it has a very nice, covered approach to the main shrine, which made it a very nice place to hang out and try to take aesthetically pleasing images.  Of course, that doesn't quite balance the fact that it's a bit of a hike to get to the shrine from the train station, especially when you realize you have to walk all the way BACK when you finally do leave, but, you know, ya gotta keep looking for those rainbows...

I grabbed a bite to eat when I got back to the station to take my bag out of the locker (moving hotels every day is a pain in the ass, but at least Japan has lots of coin lockers...or we do until the Great Orange Monstrosity comes to town on his first presidential visit 😑), and finally headed to the Igusa Guesthouse for the night.  By the time I stepped out of the small nearby train station is was dark, and the rain was really coming down.  Before it was just playing, but when I got to Hayashima it was like, "Oh yeahhhh...we're supposed to be having a typhoon, right?"  I followed Google maps and turned down the road it was on, stepping into one big, huge fucking puddle.   In the dark, it's a little tricky to see how deep they are, and this finally made me decide to drag out my flashlight.  I thought maybe I should step off the road onto the sidewalk as I was digging through my bag, but there were no cars around and I thought the puddles might be even worse there.  This turned out to be one of my better decisions...the "sidewalk" was actually a canal.

So, boys and girls, the moral of the story is, when it's raining, find a nice covered shopping street to while away the hours, and go to your hostel early.  The End.

Size Does Matter

(Alternate Title: I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie)

For anyone out there who may be wondering, my interest in Japan goes back waaaay longer than my interest in anime.  When I was in third or fourth grade, my gifted class did a study of Japan and visited the collection at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which served as my gateway, and later this would become my art home.  This influenced me to choose Asian Art for my non-Western history course, even though African/Oceanc/etc was usually considered to be the easier way to go..  Even now that I have been infected with otaku fever, I have a lot more reasons to want to live in Japan than just access to all the merch (although that definitely figures into my list).  Just like I'd been wanting to see a proper geisha dance since my first visit, there was another spectacle that I've been trying to catch throughout my travels to Japan, and Thursday I finally got to experience it: sumo wrestling.

Five is the kind of adventurous person who likes to try everything, so when I told her I wanted to attend a sumo tournament she was like, "Alright, cool."  Apparently I gave her the impression that it was in Osaka.  Perhaps because when I told her all I could remember was that it was close by.  Sort of.  Himeji isn't technically in the same region - it's in Hyogo, whereas the rest of our trip was spent in Kansai - but it's not that far either.  A two hour train ride isn't terrible, especially since sumo tournaments typically take place during odd-numbered months, and I seem to always be on vacation in the evens.  However, there are a few special tournaments that take place in April.  When I went to Tokyo three years ago, I missed the special tournament at the Yasukuni shrine by a few days.  I wasn't going to let it happen again.

The tournament in Himeji actually started at 8, but after a long day at USJ we were in no hurry to get anywhere that early, except possibly the McDonald's up the road in Shinsaibashi.  We managed to pull into Himeji Station around 11 and after a bite of ramen, made our way to the gymnasium - about a half hour's walk.  When we got in we were given a program, a calendar (in case we wanted to catch some wrestling later this year), and a plastic bag for our shoes.  We got some help finding our seats (Japanese-size, just like on Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey) and figured we'd come in on some sort of opening ceremony.  There was a drummer playing some mad beats, and then all of the wrestlers paraded in, led by the referee, wearing these beautiful embroidered apron-like cloths called a keshomawashi (I had to look that one up, I'd never seen pictures of them before).  Some of them were carrying their babies with them, which Five thought was cute and I thought had the effect of making them seem even bigger than they already did.

Then before the actual wrestling, we got to see a wrestler have his hair done.  They all had their hair tied up in a topknot, which is part of the sumo lifestyle, it turns out.  It took at least 10 minutes (based on my file details...but it felt like it took longer).

Finally it was time for the main event.  My knowledge of sumo was almost non-existent, but I did realize there is a certain amount of ceremony to it.  Being Japanese, there is a fair amount of bowing.  Being a sport, there's some posturing thrown in as well.  Even ignorant gaijin like Five and I knew about the foot stamping part, where the wrestlers face each other in the center of the ring, lift their leg as they lean to the side, and then stomp it back down.  (Edit: Five knew about this because of Street Fighter, and was slightly offended at being grouped in with other ignorant gaijin.  See, this is the problem with sharing the spotlight!)

But apparently, as I've learned while reading up on it, there's a religious side to sumo as well.  I'd seen the salt-throwing before, and knew that it was about purification (have I ever mentioned that I've watched a lot of anime in the last three years?), but it turns out that religious tradition still has a lot to do with sumo.  The canopy overhead is even modeled after the roof of a shinto shrine.

The match doesn't actually start until both wrestlers put their hands on the ground at the same time.  In some of the matches we watched, it took longer to get to that point than the match actually lasted.  They'd come to the middle, bow, stomp, get some salt, toss it - occasionally one would do this with panache, really throw it into the air...rinse and repeat.  Most of the matches were over in a matter of seconds, after all that.  Since you win by getting your opponent out of the ring, it's sometimes just a matter of lifting them and carrying them over the line (easier said than done when your opponents are this size, but you get what I mean, right?)

I don't think Five was expecting to enjoy it as much as she did, but I think she actually got more into it than me.  The matches are so fast paced that it never got boring.  After the first one or two, we decided to bet our small change on each match.  One of us would set the wager and the other would pick the wrestler they thought would win.  I was not doing well - I'm a terrible gambler - and eventually we had to stop because I didn't have any more small change.  Instead, we refined our strategy for picking the winner.  Five based it on the color they wore, picking the color she liked better, and going for the smaller wrestler if their loincloths were the same color.  I didn't really have a strategy, merely watching the way they moved and looking at their overall muscle tone (no, that's not a joke - these guys were seriously strong).  The exception to her strategy was if one was a foreigner.  There were several - one from Georgia and another from Brazil, as well as a few that we were sure were foreign without being sure where they came from - and I pointed out that for them to be this successful in a Japanese sport, they must be really good.

At one point the matches ended - this was the lower-ranked part of the tournament, I think - and one wrestler came out with a posse of other wrestlers to have a special rope thing (called a tsuna) tied around him.  Apparently this means that he's a grand champion.  There was more pageantry with two different yokozuna posturing for the crowd (this might be a religious thing, as well...one of the articles I read said that grand champions have a god-like status).  But eventually we decided that it was time to head out, and left the gymnasium to find out that it had started raining.

Rain or not, I was still hoping to take a look at Himeji's castle.  It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and Five hadn't been to any castles yet, although we at least walked past Nijo on our way to Fire Ramen (that post is still coming, FYI).  By the time we got to the park surrounding it, though, the legs of my pants were wet and my shoes were soggy, so since Five didn't actually care, we just looked from the outside.  At least we finally got our fill of cherry blossoms - they were just beginning to get interesting before we left Kyoto, and our last night there the Kawaii Kingpin showed me the bar street, which was gorgeous with its blooms and small creek, as long as you didn't think too hard about the vomit and urine that had been deposited in the creek the previous night.  However, I'm an artist and at least a little bit of a weeb, so a trip to Japan in the spring just wouldn't be quite right without a legit amount of sakura.  Even if we couldn't sit under the trees thanks to the rain, I felt like we'd finally found that.

Take Me To Church

When I travel, there's usually a spiritual element in the works.  I didn't really plan for it in this trip, but I guess at this point, I don't really have to anymore.  Still, Orthodoxy and Catholicism aren't exactly my cup of tea.  I haven't been into that many Orthodox churches, but I remember the Catholic churches I visited in Paris and in Venice on my first go-round, and after the first one or two they kind of blurred together.  Maybe it's the fact that I've never had much of a taste for crucifixes, or the fact that painting the same scenes over and over kind of robs the artists of their creativity and keeps things from being interesting.  Or it could be the fact that they're too close to what I believe myself - so they don't have the exotic appeal of other traditions.

Whatever the case may be, I didn't give too much thought  to the churches I would see, other than St. Basil's, and yet, as it turned out, there was nothing I loved in St. Petersburg more than the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood.  Not only does it have a fantastic name (it was built by Emperor Alexander III as a memorial for his father, who was killed on the site) and a delightfully whimsical exterior, the inside's a knockout as well.  I walked past this thing several times before I went in...not because I didn't want to go in, but because I was savoring it.

I'm not as well-versed in Russian art as I should be.  I'm familiar with icons, and that's about it.  So when I saw the interior of the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood it actually blew me away.  The people were so much more lifelike than I was expecting.  In icons, the saints tend to look more like a symbol than a person.  The mosaics in Spilled Blood - and the entire ceiling and all the walls were covered with them - looked amazingly realistic, considering they are made out of bits of tile.  As a work of art, the smaller depictions of saints were balanced by larger murals, which showed scenes from the life of the Savior, and the artists used patterns as accents and framing motifs, which broke up the space.  And the colors - oh man, they were amazing!  I do love me some color.

I hadn't really intended to visit any other churches in St. Petersburg, but I was wandering past Kazan Cathedral and decided to check it out.  It was free and the sun was finally out, so I appreciated the shelter.

There's a difference between a church that is a museum and one that is not.  The Spilled Blood is now simply a museum.  Kazan Cathedral is not.  The smells of fire and beeswax hovered in the air to meet me at the door.  There were tourists, you can rest assured of that, but there was much more reverence.  And there are places to sit and contemplate the power of God.  It was a nice change.

My first stop in Moscow was the Kremlin, which (amazingly) opened before St. Basil's.  I've seen enough diamonds in my day that I didn't care to spend an extra $14 on the armory, so I just saw Cathedral Square.  Dem onion domes (you might not like onions, but you can't help loving onion domes).  It's possible I've been reading too many of the Dresden Files books in a row.  As I sat in the Assumption Church (and you know I hate to make an ass out of you and umption) I tried to feel the passing of all the people come and gone through here over its history.  It gave me goosebumps.  I also tried to imagine my life without Chinese tourists.  If they hadn't been there, it would have been a much quieter, more reflective visit.

Anyways, so I'm in the cathedrals, and when it's just me I have impulses to check out the acoustics.  I have a decent voice - some have even called it amazing -  although I guess there could be a more appropriate choice than Hozier.  Still, it makes me think about organizing a flash-mob, choir-edition, for our next school trip.

Finally I made my way to St. Basil's (aka Sankt Vasily, which appeals to me because I KNOW a Vasilis!)  Anytime I have thought of Russia, its acid trip onion domes are the image that come to mind.  Sadly, the main chapel was undergoing work and I didn't get to see it, but the smaller chapels and their bits and pieces - the tomb of Vasily among them - were just fine with me.  It is as strange on the inside as it is on the outside - there were passages at elbow-height scattered throughout the chapels on the first floor, and I wasn't sure what they were for.  Air?  Light?

The decorations (frescoes, unless I'm mistaken) on the inside were bright and colorful and patterned to.  As I was exploring the second story a group of male singers performed, and I was right about those acoustics - they're pretty gucci.  However, this is one of those times when I think the sequel was better than the original; the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood was designed with St. Basil's in mind, but I was drawn back to it in a way that its predecessor didn't.  Which is weird, since I really hadn't really known about it before I got to Russia.

Well, that's it for Russia (I think), but I have one more church to talk about.  When I started to plan the final leg of my trip, I told myself that I would only do things here in Venice that I hadn't done before.  I visited a LOT of churches when I was here in 2001, but one that I'd learned about in art history and was really excited about, the Scrovegni Chapel, was under renovation, and we didn't get to see it, so it was definitely on the list this time.

The thing is, the Scrovegni Chapel is in Padua, so it was a little bit of a side journey for me.  Last time I was in Padua we took a boat up the Brenta Canal, visiting Palladio's villas along the way.  I loved that ride, but I took a more straightforward approach this time - six euro and 26 minutes on the train got me to the city of Romeo's exile.  The chapel is not far from the train station, and I remember walking past it on the way to the train station then - I remembered it was set down a little from the sidewalk, and that there was some kind of wall around it - an old Roman arena, as it turned out.  The Scrovegni family built their palazzo (which is long gone) and chapel there.  It was Scrovegni, Jr's work, in order to give a little push in the "right direction" to the soul of Scrovegni, Sr, who was apparently the usurer (money-lender) who inspired Dante to place them in the seventh circle of hell.

I have no pictures of the inside for you; you'll have to visit the website or run a search for them, but they won't do it justice.  The barrel vault is blue, spangled with stars, and there are religious scenes three-deep along both walls.  Here's the thing, though: this is Giotto's masterpiece and it's famous because he does something different.  He makes Mary, the Magdalene, John - all these people, into REAL people.  They're more than just characters in stories.  You can see the anguish and even the tracks of tears on the faces of the women whose children were slaughtered by Herod's troops as Christ and his parents escaped to Egypt.  Before Giotto (and even to a lesser extent after), religious art was lifeless, merely symbolic.  He made the stories relateable.  Standing in that room, experiencing it firsthand, was well-worth a little side trip.

Shenanigan-ing the Fifth: Shelter from the Storm

We'd been playing pussyfoot with the rain since our second day in Istanbul.  People kept apologizing for the weather, explaining that it was usually warmer this time of year.  Little did they realize that we hailed from Mongolia - their idea of "cold" is a warm spring day to us.  Also, it was nice to not have to fight our kids over wearing the hoodies on account of it being too hot.  That said, I have to tell you that when the weather really did catch up to us, we felt it.  The fifth day of the trip we were scheduled to visit Topkapi Palace, and while the weather held long enough for me to go ahead of everyone and buy tickets...

...just FYI, apparently those 85 lira 3-day museum passes can sell out.  As in, like, everywhere.  And that sucks...

...but by the time we'd entered the second court and started to look around rain was coming down.  This was such a bummer I hardly had words for it, because the last time I visited Topkapi Palace, it was a gorgeous autumn day, and the lovely grounds really deserve to be strolled through at a leisurely pace, rather than quickly as you shiver from building to building.  Still, a palace is a palace, and I think everyone enjoyed seeing the fantastic architecture...just not as much as they would have on a sunny day.

While Time Lady stayed back with the majority of our students who were getting their fill of shopping at their second gift shop of the day, I went ahead to buy tickets for the Istanbul Archaeology Museum (since we now needed tickets for every attraction we went to) with one of my tenth grade boys (who brought a ukulele on the trip and thus earned the moniker "Ukulele Man") who had a great sense of direction and liked to be ahead of everyone else.  The main group spent so long shopping that we bought the tickets and were half the way back to the gate before they caught up to us.  Since we were all cold from the rain we decided to go to lunch down the hill from the museum first, and we all ended up eating at The Han, where most of the kids got to enjoy another meal seated on cushions (not to mention some good food).  Afterwards we went to the museum where we were THRILLED to be able to skip the ticket line and go straight in.

Now, this is where I kinda lost it a little.  We'd already "lost" kids a couple of times - once because they forgot to check in before wandering off, once because "Can I goof around?" means something different to me than it does to one of my students.  And I had not yelled at anyone, even though at one point I promised to murder one of them, because we were on vacation and I didn't want anyone - myself included - to have a shitty time.  As we were getting ready to leave the first building of the museum, a few of the girls were straggling, and when they and Time Lady caught up to the main body of the group, we came up one girl short.  And I cracked.  It's a big enough museum that you aren't going to be able to find someone just by looking, so I waited out in the cold rain while Time Lady went on in with the rest, and I started feeling sorry for myself and got pissed off for a couple of reasons, so that 10 minutes later, when I made a lucky guess and went in looking for our girl, I couldn't actually talk to her, and had to go off by myself for a few minutes once she was with the rest to cry a little.  It didn't ruin the rest of the trip for me, but it made me ready to go home, and even though when we did get home it was disappointing to be back and I was all about planning a trip for next year, I also needed to be left the hell alone for a while.

It helped to lift my spirits that after a short walk up the hill we were visiting one of my all-time favorite places, the Basilica Cistern.  You walk down steps into a cavern of water held up by columns, lit from below by a soft golden glow.  Every time I'm there it feels like magic, like a different time or even a different world.  It's my kinda place.

We went from there back to the hotel for about an hour, where people put on dry clothes and I let myself nap for about a half hour, before we headed out to our belly dance workshop.  This was another of my ideas for something we could do in the evenings, and on bellydanceclasses.net I found Hale Sultan, a fantastic Turkish dancer who agreed to do a workshop for us for a great price, and was super flexible with our schedule and the weather.  We ended up going to her studio in Taksim, and I had to listen to both grumbles and giggles along the way, because a lot of my students didn't exactly know what to make of the fact that they were going to learn belly dance.  Once we got started, though, almost everyone enjoyed themselves.  In our two hours Hale talked about some of the history and culture of belly dance as well as teaching us most of the basic isolations.  She was a great teacher - she kept it fun and fast paced, and at least a couple of the girls told me they'd like to learn more. Afterwards we went out to Istiklal Caddesi (known as "the street" by all my students, most of whom were keen to go back) to grab a bite to eat before heading to Sultanahmet.