“People sometimes have to correct my English. I knew I had a problem when Arnold Schwarzenegger started doing it.”
— George W. BushOccupy Nara!
They just want their fair share of the crackers.
Obligatory Golden Pavilion Photo
It’s one of the laws of tourism.
Other blossoms
The Kyoto Botanical Garden had all sorts of blooms. Here’s one of the non-cherry blossoms:
Just don’t ask me what this thing is…
One more cherry blossom
Culture for its own sake
Just in case you plan to set up a backyard saké brewery, here’s how you go about it, courtesy of the folks at Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum.
Readable full-size version here. The museum is a fun little side trip, by the way, with a gift shop and tasting bar. The “retro” saké they only sell there is sweeter than most current products; several bottles made it into our luggage, along with their plum wine.
Next trip, we’ll have to visit the Suntory Yamazaki beer and whisky museums, as Jeffrey Friedl did here and here.
Specialized vocabulary
This is a hakama, most commonly seen today on martial artists and miko:
Take one drink if you picked "tiger"
One of the drinking games at the maiko dinner is “Tora tora”, a variant of rock-paper-scissors where the players are hidden from each other by a screen, and step out miming a character: samurai beats tiger, tiger beats grandmother, grandmother beats samurai. We had a large group, but every time someone picked tiger, the other person had picked samurai.
Fortunately, they had non-alcoholic drinks available for when the kids lost.
When an even-smaller little girl lost a round, the honorable samurai who’d slain her tiger generously gave her the winner’s prize and took the drink instead.
Not a cherry blossom picture
Sometimes all those white and pink blossoms filling the trees get a bit overwhelming, and you need to turn away, look down, and relax your eyes.
