one down, four to go

Now all of you may not know this, but I was a girl brought up on disney movies and My Neighbor Totoro. Disney left me wishing my hair would do wondrous effortless things for me, and Totoro had me forever wishing to see a great camphor tree for myself someday (and maybe find a totoro there!). Since then, seeing a camphor tree in person has been one of my "life goals" to achieve whenever given the chance.

Well ladies and gents, I finally had that chance.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today we traveled in on our own to Kyoto in order to watch the Aoi Matsuri procession from the Imperial Palace. In Japan, it is quite a rarity to see horses, so the majority of the parade was traditionally dressed men astride beautiful steeds. Unfortunately for those steeds, most of the riders were very inexperienced or at least incapable of calming their mounts, so there were many pinned ears and white rimmed eyes among the slightly antsy horses. Everything proceeded calmly enough, though, and the crowd at the event was absolutely huge.

The festival itself is over 1400 years old, and revolves around Hollyhock (which is why it's on almost every procession participant). This however, was not our only reason for coming into the city on this day.
We wanted to navigate our way to the Shoren-in Temple to see the 800 year old camphor tree(s) and then go shopping in the covered mall that Professor Thomas walked us through the other day.

We picked up all sorts of bobbles and trinkets in the shopping mall, as well as encountering a shop owner's cat and snagging lunch in a traditional-style-no-English-spoken-here tiny dining/bar restaurant. I had my very first bowl of KASTU-DON

Followed quickly by the very delicious and somewhat humorous, yet cheap(!), TAIYAKI

(Taiyaki is like a pancake that is filled with either cream, chocolate cream, or red bean paste. Super delicious and only cost a dollar.)

We stayed out for most of the day and by the time we got back to our little apartment, we were exhausted but very happy with what we'd achieved. Nothing else really sticks out about the day....except for when I accidentally got left behind at a subway station in the middle of our commute. (I seem to have a knack for getting lost in subways.......) We quickly found each other again (I hopped the next train headed the same way we were going and met the rest of my group at the next station), but I really need to pay more attention and always keep my phone on me at all times. At least the very best of outcomes was the one we got, right?

We're scheduled to head back into Kyoto tomorrow after lunching in Otsu (on the way to Kyoto) and meeting with Toshimitsu Imai who has been very involved in both the military and the government during WWII and is now a retired policeman. It's bound to be a very interesting day~!