Headed home and many thanks

Last night, I joined Kenny for a lovely dinner with some of his friends. We ate in a ninth-floor restaurant with a great view of Shinjuku, which is sort of like Times Square on steroids.
I'm nearly done packing and need to catch an 11:45 a.m. bus for the airport.
Kenny leaves tomorrow and heads home to Mike and then more adventure, but he will have to tell you all about that.
I'm grateful for all of Kenny's planning and patience, and his understanding when I've had difficult moments on this trip. I've seen Japan in a way that I never even imagined, and learned more than I could possibly share here.
Thank you to Joyce, Dave and David and Mauricio, and all my Noh friends. And all of Kenny's friends who were so kind during my stay here.
Thank you to Kim for taking care of things at home, and Joel and Bill for all the support. And thank you to everyone who sent me notes about the blog and the trip. It was good to feel connected while traveling.

Back in Tokyo, briefly

Kenny and I arrived in Tokyo a little after noon local time Tuesday. Tokyo has gone from winter to spring since we left. It's warm and sunny.
I leave tomorrow (Wednesday) around 4 p.m., and will arrive in Connecticut Wednesday around 9:30 p.m. Who knows where the times goes?
I'll try to post something from the trip home.

Hot water, old trolleys and a ferris wheel

Kenny and the Botchan Ressha.

Kenny and I changed hotels yesterday morning. We moved just a few miles across town, but the new hotel looks out over Dogo Onsen, a hot-spring spa that is supposed to date back 3000 years.
We checked in early, and then decided to head back across town.
Kenny has been tracking down sites and information related to two famous writers connected with the area - Natsume Soseki and Masaoka Shiki. (I'm reading Soseki's novel Botchan now. The onsen plays a part in this book, so that adds a little something to my reading.)
Yesterday, Kenny wanted to visit the home (or re-creation of the home) where Shiki lived. We set out from our new location near the onsen on the old-style trolley, named the Botchan Ressha. It is impossible to walk a block here without seeing something about these two writers. And of course the trolley also plays a part in Soseki's novel.

The conductor.

We found Shiki's modest house tucked between a small Zen temple and a cemetery.

Kenny tells me this is a tanuki. It's outside Shiki's house.

The house is also behind the Matsuyama Takashimaya department store, which features an enormous ferris wheel on the ninth floor roof. I've been a little obsessed with all the ferris wheels we've seen from train during this trip, and as we passed the store we found an ad that seemed to imply the ferris wheel was operating.

The ferris wheel from Shiki's house.

From the ferris wheel, with the castle in the distance.

Kenny decided to pass on the ferris wheel, so I went up alone, enjoyed a slow circle around, and seemed to be nearly level with the castle at the highest point.
We came back to the area near the onsen for lunch and then took a little break.
By 5:30 in the afternoon it was time to go to the onsen. I changed into to the yukata, or cotton kimono provided by the hotel, and Kenny and I walked across the street.
There are a few levels of service available at the onsen. We could have paid less than the equivalent of ten dollars for the more public baths, but we choose the more private bath and a tatami room with tea and snacks.
This was my second visit to an onsen, and it is sort of a little production. In this case, we were taken to our lounging room, and then we each headed down the stairs to the separate baths for men and women. I put my robe and glasses in the locker, cleaned up in the washing area, and eased my way into the hot water. This is mineral water, from someplace deep and volcanic, so it's not exactly the same as taking a hot bath. I stayed in the water until I felt nearly overcome by the heat, and then made my way back to our tatami room. We were taken on a tour of the emperor's private bath (no longer used) and then back to our room, where we were served sweet rice balls and tea.
Out on the street, and in the shopping arcade that begins near the entry to the onsen, many people, of all ages, where strolling around in their cotton kimonos and enjoying the warm evening.
Sushi for dinner and an early night.

Pictures from the Castle

Only photos today. We visited Matsuyama Castle yesterday, walked way more than we should have, and had some wheat-free yakitori at the end of the day.

The view from the top of the castle.

The walls, from below.

The door-less first gate.

A glimpse of the maze of gates from above.

The haiku post. I didn't bring any poems with me.

A suikinkutsu. Dripping water makes a musical sound that you can hear if you put your ear to the end of the curved bamboo pipe.

Uchiko

We set out yesterday morning for Uchiko, one of the little towns that has been on Kenny's list for a while. We took a trolley to the train station and bought tickets using our rail pass for the last time - the pass expired at the end of the day yesterday.

The Matsuyama trolley.

Kenny tries his luck.

It was a short trip up, and through, the mountains. We might have been in tunnels more than we were out, and it did make me stop and wonder about the work of building all these railways. That must have been a project.

A view from the train.

Uchiko is a sleepy little town, with an older district that grew up around the vegetable wax industry. Vegetable-wax making is nearly extinct here, but the old streets and buildings remain. And although a few buildings have been converted to museums, the town is occupied, and there are shops and restaurants in the old part of town, and the sense that things here retain a little of how life might have been 100 years ago. Cars, yes, but also bicycles, and foot-traffic.
We stopped first at the Kabuki-za, which was built in 1916 and has been restored and is now a working theater. Our admission ticket allowed us to roam around backstage, upstairs, and down the tunnels that lead to the stage machinery. It's always good to roam around a theater.

The main seating area.

Under the stage.

The main stage.

We visited the Uchiko History Museum, the home of a wax merchant that is now occupied by life-sized mechanical figures who talk when you pass by. Not quite realistic, and a little startling sometimes, but we where able to walk around the tatami rooms, visit the store-house and the court-yard garden.

I help out in the kitchen. (One of these figures is a mechanical dummy.)

We visited a few other places, including a mansion that is also a museum and now serves tea and sells small gifts. The bigger house museum, the Kamihaga Residence, was closed for renovations, but the visitors center was open, and we were able to learn about the history of wax in the area, and the complicated process for extracting wax from sumac berries.

For Mike, from Kenny. Some sidewalk sculpture.

We were looking for a restaurant, which seemed to be closed, and generally starting to head back toward the train station, when we found a small shop that makes and sells vegetable wax candles. The candle-maker was busy in the back, where we could watch him work, and his wife was in charge of the store. Late last night Kenny sent me a link from Frommer's about this candle-maker. He's the last one. We had no idea when we stopped in, and now I think I own some of the world's rarest candles.

The sleep streets of Uchiko.

After the train trip back, and a little rest, we headed out for yakatori, which Kenny tells me was delicious. It was a busy place, and that made it difficult to get anyone to pay attention to my little gluten-free print out.

For Joel

Windy

For the most part, the travel connections I've made with Kenny have been smooth. We've had reasonably good luck finding elevators, for instance, and until today only had one connection that was fast (nine minutes) and required us to haul our luggage up one long set of stairs and down another.
We set out today from Kyoto Station on the bullet train, then transferred to a more local train to bring us onto the island of Shikoku. This leg of the trip includes a series of bridges across the Inland Sea. The weather was rainy, and the islands and mountains faded away into the mist.
While we were waiting at one train station, I made friends with a little kid who was waiting on the platform. We smiled and waved at each other and I took a picture.


And we traveled along the Inland Sea for a while.


So it was all mostly uneventful. We had not been on the island proper for too long when the man in the seat in front of us turned around to tell us there was a problem with the trains up ahead. He had heard us speaking English, and I assume he was concerned that we hadn't understood the announcements. Which was true.
The day had turned quite windy, and so the train traffic through the windiest parts of the mountains had been suspended. We were going to get off at one station and then we would be bused to a station a little further along, where another train would be waiting for us.
The transfer went reasonably smoothly, although I'm much slower with my luggage than Kenny, and this was one of those stations that didn't have an elevator or an escalator, so it was up the stairs, over the walkway across the tracks and down the stairs on the other side. (I'll pack lighter next trip)
Everything was well organized, and after waiting in line for a bit, we found a big tour bus waiting. We stowed our luggage and climbed up, and I'll admit I had a little moment of distress when I couldn't see an empty seat.
But there was a little fold out jump seat in the aisle, and someone popped it into place and off we went.
I've had to shuffle between trains and buses both on the New York subway and MetroNorth, It's usually a big noisy deal. Here though, with a bus full of people suddenly taken right out of their routine, there was only silence. Quiet. There might have been a few whispered conversations, but I didn't hear any. My aisle seat was toward the back of the bus and when a cell phone near me rang, and a woman answered, in a very subdued voice, people at the front of the bus turned around to look.
It took us a few minutes to get onto the highway, and then we got a scare. The winds were bad indeed, and pushed the bus across the highway at one point. There was a collective gasp from everyone on the bus, and then the driver pulled back into his lane and took the rest of the trip a little more slowly.
A train was waiting for us a few miles down the road, and we arrived in Matsuyama in a warm rain, only about an hour late.

Noodles at the end of the day.