Karoake at last

Saturday, April 8
Our last full day in Japan. We decided to do a small day trip to Arashiyama, about 20 minutes from Kyoto by train. The main draw to Arashiyama is the dense bamboo forests. It was my first time in a bamboo forest, and it was amazing. The trees are absolutely gorgeous, but my favorite part was when they would blow in the wind. The trees are so much taller than I expected and extremely bendable, so all of the trees curve in the same direction and make a fantastic hollow banging sound when the wind blows. The path is aligned with shrines and temples, so we stopped off at Tenryuji Temple, which was built in 1339, and rated as one of Japan’s top five Zen temples.

The gardens surrounding the temple are breathtaking—the gardens-designed by Muso Soseki, the temple's founding abbot-are mostly made of moss, which is the traditional design of Zen gardens, sprinkled with beautiful ponds and cherry trees throughout. It was a really nice walk, and the path through the garden to us back to the center of the adorable little town where we enjoyed warm tofu in soy sauce with ginger and green onion on top followed by cherry blossom ice cream. Delicious!

After our day trip, we headed back and made plans to meet up with our British friends Jez and Emma for a night out. We headed to Kushya, which is like a Japanese tapas restaurant. We enjoyed several rounds of tasty little skewered appetizers. They cooked some of the meat with grape branches and a charcoal fire—pretty cool. The food was good, but the company even better. We had a great time and enjoyed our new friends company over a couple rounds of beer. A few beers later, we decided it would be the ideal time to get our Karaoke on.

We wondered the streets looking for the Karaoke bar that the waitress told us was close by. Several blocks later, I looked up and said a HUGE neon sign that read KARAOKE. The guys, in their somewhat drunken oblivion didn’t see it, so I had to point out the obvious. There was our mecca.

The karaoke bar smelled of drugs and beer. We got a small room (as I mentioned in previous blog, karaoke is not done in front of a large crowd) and ordered another round of beers, with an extra one for Emma, who wanted to be just about any other place than where we were.

We originally decided to get the room for ½ an hour, just to say that we did it, but 1 ½ later, we finally finished up after several bad impressions of ABBA, Kenny Rogers, Sir Mixalot, Beastie Boys, Beatles, Pixies, and Cyndi Lauper. It was a total laugh, and even Emma got into it after her 2 beers-so MVP to Emma for being an awesome sport!!!

Kyoto closes down pretty early so we hailed a cab home, and settled in for our last night before leaving for DC.

Final Japan blog to come: overall observations.