Tonight I got a surprise call from one of my friends, Ceili (Kay-lee). She lives right next to me, and we often visit each other. Today she popped up at my door with a last minute invitation and I got ready in two minutes flat. We joined five other people and headed downtown, to a light up at one of the temples. Kiyomizu is a pretty famous temple, and is known for being built on a waterfall. I’d been there twice, but this was the first time I went the whole way through. It was pretty amazing. It wasn’t lit by lanterns or anything as romantic as that, just normal lamps. However, the light bouncing off of the buildings and the autumn leaves created a stunning effect. It was also raining (as it seems to almost every day here in Kyoto), and that seemed to caste a slight fuzzy glow to everything. Or that may have just been the blur of my camera. Nevertheless, it was pretty nice, and I hope to maybe go again before they stop the light up.
Light up night!
(sorry for the sideways picture…)
After the temple, we walked for a bit and found a restaurant. I wasn’t very hungry, so I tried something from and oden. Oden is kind of a weird soup that has chunks of vegetables or meat in it. I ended up getting this:
It’s kind of a tofu bag filled with something that has the consistency of melted mochi. Very… strange. I still don’t know whether I like it or not. My stomach is also unsure… Maybe it just doesn’t know how to digest traditional Japanese foods. I don’t really blame it, though. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to judge what exactly a food is. But that’s really part of the fun. I love not knowing what I’m ordering half the time, and when I do recognize something, I’m almost tempted to get a different mystery food, even if I know what I want. It bothers me all of the people who come to Japan and don’t want to try new things. Or they get tired of this one dish, but aren’t brave enough to try another (as I write this, I know that karma may come and I may have to eat my words… pun not intended). However, I am kind of biased. I love most Japanese food, and have found few dishes that I outright dislike. If I were traveling to a place like India, I may be less adventurous because while I like their food, I do not like all of it. Japanese food in general is simple, most times mushy, and has meat with slabs of fat still attached.
