Meanwhile at the Legion of Doom...

...or Fire Up the Time Machine, Igor!!!


My dear, faithful reader, I'm afraid we've finally come to that dark day where I am unable to keep the narrative going chronologically, due either to my sieve-like memory or my lack of pictures to make it even partially interesting to read this blog in the first place. An elephant never forgets, but a bear Hibernates for about a fourth of the year, so... Anyhoo, I thought today I would take a cue from the second Purikura photo I posted yesterday and talk about the third and so far the best trip I have been on to date (with no offense meant to anyone reading this blog who thought that WE had had the bast trip ever). As a preface to this story (and for those who don't know), I went to a lovely High School in Birmingham, Alabama called the Alabama School of Fine Arts, or ASFA for short. During my freshman year there, red-faced and baby-eyed, I made friends with a lovely girl from Japan named Yu Satoh, and then right after that year was over she returned to Japan and the state of Alabama wept. As this is the first time I have been back to Japan since before my Freshman year of High School, I naturally got in touch with her and made a little play date, and before I knew it I was off the Kyoto Eki (which means Station) to reconnect with my past. (Below is a picture of High School Jidai [era], when the world was still something I really didn't have time for.)

Unfortunately I inherited from my father what I like to call Travel Anxiety, to the extent that I almost inevitably end up where I need to be for any given thing much much earlier than I ever would have needed to. Subsequently, because I wasn't exactly sure how to get where I was going, I left about two hours before I had to be there... you know, just in case. I did end up getting there about an hour earlier than I needed to, and so I spent the time sitting in a rather fancy coffee shop sipping cappucino and nibblin' on a Salmon and Spinach sandwich. Finally an hour creeped by just as slowly as it possibly could and I met up (with exaltation and tear-filled eyes) with my dear dear friend Yu and her dear dear friend Ayaka. Immediately we hopped on yet another train and headed towards just about the coolest place on the face of the world: Samurai/Ninja World.

Okay, fine, so it's not called Samurai/Ninja World, but they would make about ten times the money in tourism if it was! It is actually called Toei Kyoto Studio Park (I know it's hard to make out the sign with Yu and I looking so radiant in the foreground), and is the place where they film all sorts of Samurai and Ninja flicks and dramas. Suffice it to say that it is bar none the most blatantly interesting tourist trap I've been to since the Great Pyramids. The place was COVERED in period buildings and there were folks all dressed up as samurai all over the place... 

...not to mention...

Coincidentally, the sign in the back of that last one literally reads "Ninja Cafe". Ninja Cafe, I ask you! How could this not be a slice of heaven here on Earth? And for those of you who think looking like a Samurai is lame...

... now we look like ninjas. We didn't actually climb on a roof, though, I'm not quite that limber yet. They had a roof built on the ground that you could climb up. What I found most intriguing about the place (aside from the fact that there were [fake] ninjas and samurais everywhere) was how convincingly they made their reproduction of the Edo Jidai (Edo period, roughly 1600s to 1800s) buildings, and even a little town, as evidenced below... 

Perhaps the tables were a bit innocuous, I admit. But I even got to become a shopkeeper for a bit at my own Tempura stall... IRASSHAIMASEEEEEEEEEE.

I suppose I should explain that last outburst. In Japanese there is something called Keigo, which means formal language. Keigo is a bitch to learn and most Japanese people can't really speak it well until they get some sort of job that requires it, and then they are trained in it. The reason any of this is relevant is that whenever one walks into a department store or a restaurant, or walks past someone selling something, said shopkeeper shouts (and in the most nasal and whiny of tones more often than not) IRASHAIMASEEEE (pronounced ee-rah-shah-ee-mah-say). In that photo, though you can't really tell to look at me, I was screeching Irashaimase as shrilly as I possibly could. Anyhoo. There was a cool hashi (bridge) representing the big old famous one in Tokyo, and we had fun pretending to run on that...

... and just in case you thought I was lying about how beautiful those buildings were...

Yummy. Now, one of the weirder things we saw at the park was something that I almost couldn't wrap my head around. We were walking past a pool of water when suddenly hidden speakers all around us starting playing really bad eighties movie renditions of growling tigers or something like that, and two little misters popped out of the water and started making the place nice and foggy. I honestly thought Mick Jagger was going to rise out of the water and start serenading us. ( I don't own this photo, and quite frankly, who would want to?)

Thankfully something much more palatable and attractive made an appearance...

IT'S GODZILLA! I THOUGHT I WAS HAVING A STROKE! Unfortunately, this very odd rendition of Godzilla (which honestly looks a bit more like a raptor than anything else) only came out of the water about that much, and was as realistic as Newt Gingrich winning the Republican Primary (ZING!). I sincerely apologize to any Newt Gingrich supporters, and hope you get better very soon. Anyhoo, the best part of that little portion of the trip (aside from watching two fake samurais go at it with Katanas for fake) was the entire reason Yu wanted to take me there in the first place. For the low low price of 1850 yen (around $25 American [as opposed to Canadian, I guess]) you could go into a tiny room and get squeezed into any costume of your choosing, including a hair piece, and have a picture snapped before you even realize you signed up to do it in the first place. The entire process probably took about two minutes, and will last a lifetime. The most jarring part was the corset-like Japanese cummerbund that they squeezed me into to make me look even more top heavy, I guess. The result, however, is breath taking...

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING SO BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE?! I'm still not even sure it's real, I keep pinching myself on the off chance I'm in the Matrix, because nothing could be so beautiful and be of this Earth. However, I'm afraid the girls one upped me on that one. I give you Ayaka Hime (princess)...

... and the radiant Yu Hime...

I'm sorry the pictures are a bit lopsided, but beauty comes at a price... 1850 円, to be exact. After we had had our fill of being bloody awesome, and after emptying our coffers at the Gift Shop (Nick, Carolina, Julian...) we headed back towards Kyoto Eki (which is, who knows..? That's right, Timmy, it's Station. You get a gold star. The rest of you... DEMERITS!), and searched out a delicious Sushi place near the Station. I would go into detail about that, but I'm planning a special food-related blog for a bit later, so... keep an eye out for that. (And I don't own this, but God I wish I did).

Now comes a part in the blog I'm going to start dubbing "And Then I Went to Karaoke". We really did go to Karaoke after eating far too much, and while I have photographic evidence, I think you'll find that the links below will be much more to your liking... albeit painful to listen to, perhaps. 
Time to Say Goodbye by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli
Truth by Arashi
And the sublimity of me holding a mike...

I almost forgot why I started talking about this trip in the first place... PURIKURA, which stands for what, Students? That's right Nerdy-Girl-in-the-Front-Row, Print Club. This one went much better as I had the common sense to take off my glasses, and the picture cannot but sum up everything that is beautiful about my dear friends and what is so characteristically off about myself. Enjoy... THE LOVE TRAIN.

I look like an unusually large 7 year old Make Up model, don't you think? Around time to head back home (which was whiny and sad and probably not worthy of our collected years), we hit Kyoto Station for one of the delectables Kyoto is famous for... and I've forgotten what it's called. I get a demerit now. However, I have my superfluous words and my phone camera pictures!

These scrumptious yummies are comprised of a kind of dough that has been infused with the flavor of the treat (this one happens to be Ichigo, or Strawberry), which is folded around a glob of what I can only assume is bean paste, also infused with the flavor of the treat, which makes the whole thing look a bit like a loose dumpling. It's not an overly sweet snack, and in America I'm not sure it would strictly speaking be categorized as a candy, but no matter which way you slice it it's freaking delicious. Yu and I (tears in our eyes and promises in our hearts) decided we would meet up again to do Nara at the end of the month, and then somewhere else April and May, so I'll keep ya'll abreast of that as it comes up. (The picture below represents Yu and I, and in no way has any qualities which make it something that could be said to be of my personal ownership.)

... I miss you, Yu. I think I've wasted enough of ya'lls' precious time, and so without further ado I guess I'll sign off with a bit of a Jon Stewart nod. This isn't a moment of Zen, this is A Brief Space of Time in Which Zen Exists.

ご親切にありがとうございます、
Alex -..-