You know the nice thing about blogging? I don’t have to carefully craft every word, or bring my rough drafts to a critique group, or obsess over whether it’s good enough or unique enough or perfect enough. I can publish a janky post with awkward transitions and uneven pacing that ends in an unsatisfying way and you don’t even mind. So, with that being said…
From Tokyo we took the shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. The only picture I got is of the boys waiting for us to buy tickets.
The train was moving too fast to take pictures of anything we went by. We passed right in front of an enormous Mt. Fuji, and by the time I told the boys to look outside, the whole mountain was gone, poof!
Kyoto was a nice change of pace. Still a big city, but not a mega city, and with plenty of day trips a train ride away. On Wednesday we visited the deer at Nara Park. They were much easier to take pictures of than the shinkansen, mainly because we had crackers.
If you bow to the deer, they bow back!
(I think that one was just looking to see if it dropped any cracker crumbs, but we’ll count it anyway.)
When you’re out of crackers, you have to put your hands up like you’re under arrest or the deer nip at you.
We fed one deer so much, he thought we adopted him (he’s guy in the back, trying to blend in).
Next thing you know, he’ll be leaving half-drank cans of Bubly around and wiping his hooves on our good towels.
On Thursday, we traveled even farther out to tour the Obubu tea farm so Vincenzo could earn some street cred at his bubble tea shop back home.
Fun fact: green tea is made from leaves of a specific kind of camellia plant.
Unfun fact: In the summer the workers have to wear boots because of the snakes, whose bite is usually fatal without antivenom. Also, there are wasps the size of birds.
Cool fact: The things that look like streetlights are giant fans. When the temperature drops too low, sirens go off in town and the fans start circulating air to keep the leaves from getting damaged. And now you know why this is a cool fact instead of a fun fact.
I love these next pix of V. I can’t believe how grown up he looks!
The tea farm tour included pounding mochi, eating lunch, tasting countless kinds of tea, and making matcha.
Everything was tea-licious.
Especially the mar-tea-nis.
(Dads aren’t the only ones who can make those jokes!)
On Friday we planned to visit the monkeys at Iwatayama Park. We didn’t exactly know how to get there, so we tailed the confident British family in front of us, only to find out too late that they were going to the Bamboo Forest. We did find these three monkeys to take pictures of though.
The other monkeys were just across the bridge, so we got to see them too.
We couldn’t shake the first ones though.
Since the monkeys roam free at Iwatayama park, there are sign warning you not to look them in the eyes, not to point your camera at them, and not to crouch down. This sign below was most helpful in reading their facial expressions.
I think they meant “scared.” It was one of many charming mistranslations from the trip.
On Saturday, we visited Nijo Castle.
Fun fact: The inside has lots of murals, many of which show tigers. Tigers don’t exist in Japan, but Japanese artists became intrigued with them after seeing tiger pelts in the 16th century, so they just guessed.
A sign at Nijo castle said that the Japanese believed every fourth tiger cub was a leopard…but when I fact-checked on-line, everything I find says that they believed female tigers were leopards, which is also a fun fact but you can’t have both, so please pick only one.
Also, the floors of Nijo castle sound like birds chirping when you walk on them. A sign at the castle explained this happened over time due to how the nails settled over time…but on-line research says it may have been designed that way on purpose to alert residents of intruders. Maybe these shouldn’t be called “fun facts” but rather “fun hypotheses?”
We also swung by the Golden Palace, which was originally a retirement villa built for a shogun. You know, something that might be named Shady Groves if it were built in an American suburb today.
Fun fact: The Golden Palace was burned down by a fanatical monk in 1950 and rebuilt. In fact, pretty much every temple and shrine we saw had been burned down and rebuilt one to four times.
On our last day we stopped by the samurai museum.
We learned that samurai soldiers could be as young as 13, so they put moustaches on the face masks to make them look older.
That means that this guy below here—the one in the middle—he’s just one year plus a muskrat moustache away from being samurai ready!
My favorite fun fact from the museum: a samurai’s sword can only slice through a body three times before it needs to be sharpened again.
Leo’s favorite fun fact: The samurai also loved guns.
And like that, our vacation was over. I’ll write one more post of random odds and ends, and then this trip will be all packed and preserved and ready to be stored for future reference.
Oh wait, looks like someone has a quick question before I sign off for today.
Got any crackers?
MrsMouthy's Weblog 
