More temples? Let’s go to the Rub a Dub!

We check out of Gojo Guesthouse at 11am today. Robby is disconsolate. He loves this place with its relaxing & welcoming ambience & its friendly clerks.
We travel to northern Kyoto to our next ryokan, Rakucho. It is located in a quiet neighborhood near a street hardly as busy as Gojozaka Dori. But our room is big & had lovely touches of details: a hanging rack for our towels, shelf space, tea, laundry basket. & our room faces a small garden. All the bathroom fixtures are modern, which equals clean, which appeases Robby’s forlorn demeanor.

At 1:30pm, we leave & catch lunch on our way to the bus stop. We find a small, empty ramen shop. At first, we don’t see anyone inside until we peer over the counter & find a bobbing head of hair. “Sumimasen (Excuse me),” we say. The bobbing head stirs & up pops a middle-aged woman. We order our food (ramen & soba) & wait as the woman makes a phone call then aimlessly busies herself with boiling water. A salary man comes in for lunch, but after a short exchange with the woman, he leaves. 10 minutes later (an awfully long time to wait for ramen), her son shows up on his bike. He hurries into the kitchen & begins cooking. Now we see activity behind the counter; the fan is turned on, lids are lifted to reveal steam, colanders are whipped around, vegetables are chopped. It is then that we realize that this woman does not know how to cook. We caught her unawares in the late afternoon, so we had to wait for the competent cook to arrive. How odd. If we understood Japanese, we would have caught on right away from her phone call. The ramen is too salty, but the soba is delicious.

We head out for Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. It’s all right, only an impressive golden building beside a serene lake. Robby passively rails against these temple visits. I agree with him, though I don’t have the fervent aversion he has. We learn very little about these historical sights, so we leave feeling dissatisfied that all we saw was a building. It’s our own fault for not have researched the history of these places before coming to Japan. We were wrong to assume that information in English would be offered to us at all these places.

At Rakucho Ryokan, we nap before going to central Kyoto. Dinner is at Mosburger (for the second time, the first time being in Tokyo). We go to Rub a Dub. Robby invites three young guys, two Japanese & one French, to join our table. They are three techies from out of town, nice guys. Robby gets his chance to inquire about Japanese technology. An Indonesian college student from Osaka joins us later, but by then we have to leave to catch the bus. Robby promised an early return to the ryokan, so we board #205 to Rakucho Ryokan & get to sleep by midnight.

By now my two blistering mosquito bites have popped.