Kyoto: the sights and sounds

In one word: wow. Now let me explain...

On Saturday I got to my first temple at 8.45am (don't worry, I've not had a personality transplant), which turned out to be a good idea for two reasons - it wasn't too hot yet (only about 28 degrees!) and it wasn't too busy yet. After walking up a little hill, lined with gift shops, I reached the entrance of Kiyomizu-dera.


Most of the buildings in this temple are 400 years old, although there has been a temple there since the 7th century.


The main building is built on giant slits and sits on the hillside.


Its famous for its sacred springs (mizu is Japanese for water), which are meant to have healing powers. I drank some but I can't say I've felt the benefits yet...


I also came across this crowd, no idea why they're wearing bibs:



I later found out that I picked a good day to visit Kiyomizu-dera - apparently if you went on that Saturday, you get the same spiritual benefits as going for 1000 days! After wandering around the area for a while I headed down some brilliant old streets (I later found out that this is the Lonely Planet's recommended path) towards my next temple. On the way, I bumped into these two:




They looked even more beautiful in real life. I can't even begin to imagine how uncomfortable they must have been though, it was about 30 degrees by this point and they were wearing so many layers! The heat in Kyoto was unbearable - weather reports said it was 33 degrees, but with about 50% humidity and not a cloud in the sky, it felt more like 40 degrees. I thought I was about to spontaneously combust on a number of occasions.

Yasaka-jinja was the next shrine I visited, and there was actually some sort of service being held inside, so I couldn't go into the main bit. There were so many lanterns hanging from one of the buildings.




I then hopped on the bus to Ginkaku-ji (the Silver Pavilion), which was a bit confusing as you get on through the back door and pay on your way out... This was one of my favourite temples at it had immaculate gardens - there were people employed to sweep any fallen leaves off the moss on the hillside, that's how beautifully kept the grounds were.




I then walked along the 'Philosopher's Path' towards Nanzen-ji. This two-kilometer long river-side path is a beautiful way to get between temples and is lined with cherry blossom trees that must look incredible in Spring.

I was impressed by the inside of Nanzen-ji as they still have all the original wood panels and painted sliding doors that have been there for centuries.




I spent the rest of the afternoon essentially getting lost. Kyoto is a wonderful city to get lost in - it's a brilliant mix of old, winding streets lined with traditional buildings and syscrapers and shopping malls. I spent most of the afternoon wandering around Nishiki Food Market and indulging in some retail therapy (my excuse is that I needed to go into the shops to cool down...). It turns out that I have some sort of homing signal as I managed to shop myself back to within 20 yards of my ryokan without even realisng it!

I woke up on Saturday to discover that a monsoon had descended on the city. This didn't put me off sightseeing though and actually helped to cool down the air a bit. Unfortunately, the rain added to the humidty, offsetting any good it had done by making everything damp and sticky. It also made taking photos very difficult as I kept getting tiny water droplets on my lense everytime I pointed the camera up, which was generally where everything I wanted to take a photo of was. Oh well.

I got the bus to Kinkaku-ji, or 'The Golden Pavilion'. This temple is incredible - it sits in the middle of an ancient, man-made pond and is completely covered in gold leaf. When it's sunny, it must be blinding to look at!


My next stop, Ryotoku-ji, was a short walk away. It is famous for its really old zen garden:


I thought that these trees were pretty cool, too:



I then walked further out and went to visit Ninna-ji - this was my favourite temple of the day because I wanted to move into the palace part of it. This is a series of beautiful, old Japanese buildings that are all connected by open walkways and surrounded by perfect bonsai and zen gardens.




Within the temple complex (it covers a huge area), there are loads of other buildings and shrines, including a five-storey pagoda.



The last pace I had time to visit before catching the shinkansen back was Nijo-jo (Nijo Castle). This castle sits in the centre of Kyoto (much like Edinburgh Castle) and is surrounded by ridiculously tall and thick granite walls and a moat. The inside of the palace was amazing, but they didn't let me take any photos :( All of the painted walls, ceilings and screen doors remain intact, as do all the paper walls and carved wooden decorations. The best part that has survived has to be the the 'nightingale floor' that encircles all of the rooms. This floor quietly sqeaks whenever you step on it - it doesn't make a wooden creaking noise, it actually almost sings, hence the name. I thought it was brilliant that it still works perfectly (I have no idea how the noise is created) and it made for fantastic background noise with everyone walking around the palace and looking into the rooms.

Kyoto: my ryokan and the food

My ryokan couldn't have been more perfect. I wanted to stay in a traditional Japanese-style hotel that served Japanese food and I got more than what I wanted - a fantastic room, very friendly staff, delicious food and located in the Gion district, right in the centre of Kyoto. Perfect! I couldn't recommend 'Kamogawa-kan Inn' more if you ever need a place to stay in Kyoto.

My room was surprisingly big and decked out in traditional Japanese tatami and furniture, with paper sliding windows.



I had just enough time to settle in before the two, old Japanese ladies who worked in the ryokan started to bring my kaiseki (Japanese haute cuisine) dinner. They were so kind and friendly and did absolutely everything for me!


The plates of food just kept on coming - this is what my table ended up looking like:


Every dish came with its own dipping sauce and I got a big tub of rice on the side too. It was all presented beautifully, but my favourite had to be the snow-igloo that my sashimi came in.


The food was all so delicious, so it's a bit of a shame that I still have no idea what some of it was! I asked, but didn't understand the Japanese response... The meal as a whole is very different to meals in the UK - there is a very odd mix of savoury and sweet flavours on the same plate and often in the same item. For example, small, crispy, sugared fish: salty on the inside, syrupy on the outside. The first one was a bit of a surprise, the second was quite enjoyable, but buy the third one, I had eaten enough!

The Japanese women then insisted that I got changed into the yukata that came with the room, so I obliged and got them to help me tie it. I am going to have to get myself one as they're really good.


Breakfast the next morning was another multi-course extravaganza. Again, no idea what half of it was - prizes to whoever knows what the contents of the little dishes were!


After breakfast, I was asked whether I wanted a kaiseki dinner again or shabu shabu (kind of like a meat fondue). I couldn't make my mind up so they gave me kaiseki with my own little mini shabu shabu as one of the courses! I had clearly been given the gaijin-friendly kaiseki the first night, but, impressed that I had eaten all of that, they gave me the real deal on Saturday:


One of the dishes was a speciality from the Osaka region (I think that's what she said...) and consisted solely of two fish heads. Now, whenever I eat whole fish at home, I usually stop before I get to the face. There turned out to be a surprising amount of flesh in there actually, although I couldn't face eating the eyes. The sashimi dish included sea urchin this time - I've already tried this on sushi I didn't really fancy eating it again, but did out of politeness... You know the smell of the sea lion enclosure at the zoo? That's exactly what uni tastes like.

I managed enough Japanese to have wee conversations with the two ladies and they thought I was hilarious as a result of my efforts. I must have been semi-articulate as they empathised with me when I explained how hot I was finding the weather in Kyoto compared to at home. They were so nice and took this into account when preparing my breakfast for Sunday morning; giving me dishes that were designed to cool me down, like iced tofu.


The meals were just incredicble - I want to go back just to eat some more!

For lunch, I just got food while I was out and about. Kyoto happens to have a chain of coffee houses with a very appropriate name:


I found one of my new favourite places too: Mister Donut. This is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of Krispy Kreme and every donut is only 100yen (60p!).


So on Sunday, I decided to have a variety of doughnuts for my lunch. Why? Because I'm a grown-up and can eat doughnuts for my lunch if I want to :)

Where to start...

This weekend has been so incredible, I honestly don't even know where to start!

My ryokan was amazing.
The food was some of the best I've eaten so far.
Kyoto's temples are stunning.
The climate was the hottest I've ever experienced - I got sunburnt whlist wearing factor 50+ sunscreen... THAT'S how hot it was.
The shinkansen train travelled at ridiculous speeds.
And I missed the earthquake in Tokyo this evening that hit 4.0 on the richter scale.

I'm absolutely gutted about the last one - I secretly want to experience a little (not a big one, please!) earthquake while I'm staying in Japan, so I can't believe I was away the weekend Tokyo got one. Apparently buildings moved a bit!

As a result of spending the last two days running around Kyoto, I'm absolutely shattered and will blog properly about my weekend tomorrow. After I've uploaded my rather large collection of photos :)

Intermission

I'm heading to Kyoto tomorrow straight after work for the weekend so there will be no more posts probably until Monday night.

I've been embracing my inner (and outer...) nerd over the past few days working with the quants. Today I finished my two pricing models! They both price a call option - one analytically, using the Black-Scholes model and the other using Monte Carlo simulations. I designed and programmed wee interfaces as well that you type the parameters into (stock price, strike, risk free rate, time to maturity, etc), then press a big button that says "RUN" and it spits out the result. Everybody was very impressed and I'm very proud that I managed to go from having no programming knowledge to designing pricing models in C# in the space of three days! God, I'm a geek... Next thing you know I'll start wearing a pocket protector.

This week has been very different from the last few as the quants have very British work ethics. As in they rock up at 9am, take three coffee breaks a day (that involve leaving the building and walking to insanely posh coffee shops), have a two-hour lunch break (in very posh restaurants) and then head home at about 6.30. I think I've managed to fit in quite well :)

Today's lunch was very tasty - spicy tuna donburi:



Went out for dinner and drinks with Stephen and Zach after work. Ate things on sticks while stading up and then went to a bar where all the drinks were £2. Definitely a good night.

Saltire blog part 3

Oops! Totally forgot to put a link to my round up of week three on this blog yesterday...

So here is the third installment of my SaltireFoundation blog for you to peruse at your leisure.

Reasons why I love Tokyo

AKA Reasons why I'm not coming home. Ever.

In no particular order:

The shops are fantastic and so eclectically mental.
People are so polite all the time, even if I'm being an annoying gaijin and getting in their way/not understanding them.
The food is delicious and very reasonably priced. And you don't need to tip.
The overground and underground train systems are super-efficient all over Tokyo and the surrounding areas; there are underground stations on every block and trains every couple of minutes.
All the trains and most of the stations are fully air-conditioned (why can't the London tube be like that...).
You get full 3G mobile reception everywhere, including the underground stations and on the trains (even while they're moving through the tunnels!).
You also get wifi in most stations and trains and they have mobile WiMAX here already.
It's the safest city I've ever been to. And the most convenient.
It's so easy to get away from it all by going to one of the beautiful shrines or heading to the countryside.
Everybody holds lift doors open for people when they get on and off.
All women always use the 'toilet flush sound effect' so you don't hear them pee (I do it too now, so I don't get nasty looks when I come out the cubicle).
If a person has a cold, they wear a surgical mask so that nobody else catches it from them.
There are cartoon characters on everything and everywhere and it is completely socially acceptable to buy things with cartoon characters on them, regardless of your age/sex/occupation.
The posters and adverts are often hilarious.
You will never be thirsty as there are vending machines every 20 yards or so.
So many things are open so late - shops until 10pm, restaurants until midnight and cinemas, bars and internet cafes often all night.
The people who I work with have restored my faith in financial industries and are all so lovely, kind and very down to earth. As far as I can see, RBS Tokyo is not one of the bad guys (they blame everyone at the other RBSs...).
Everybody from Tokyo is slim, looks fantastic and dresses impecably stylishly.
I must be the only female over the age of 16 who doesn't wear stilletoes everyday (how do they manage?!).
Everything is newer than brand new.

The last point was further highlighted when I nipped to the local electronics store after dinner today (a massive 8 floor extravaganza). I needed to buy an external hard drive to store all my millions of photos on! I ended up getting a new flash drive too, as I keep breaking freebie ones I get from career fairs. Check out the 4GB one I bought:


Huge, isn't it? The bit on the left is only the lid! The actual drive is only that 5mm black bit at the top! And it was only £10 - technology is so far advanced here, it's unbelievable. When I was paying for my cool stuff, I saw this TV and instantly wanted to win the lottery so that I could buy it.


It's a 103 inch high definition plasma screen and probably one of most impressive pieces of kit I have ever seen. It costs about £40,000. Yikes...

Work today was really good fun actually and it's going to sound really sad when I tell you what I found enjoyable - today was my first day of learning C#; a computer programming language. I feel so cool right now... Thing is, learning a bit of programming is massively useful for me right now and also completely applicable to what I'm studying at uni next year as well as what I'm doing at work just now. So it's win win for me! I was so proud of my day's achievements - I made a few wee programmes that estimated the value of pi using truncated infinite sums and then Monte Carlo simulations. NERD ALERT. I also used some graphics to display the results and calculation time with buttons and progress bars. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to go into more detail about the maths behind more complicated Monte Carlo simulations and make a programme that will price trades.

Remember folks: it's hip to be square.

My first day as a quant

I woke up this morning to discover that mosquitoes found one of my legs very tasty yesterday - I've got really itchy bites all around my ankle, the only part of skin that was exposed, and two on my leg that mean they must have bitten through my leggings!

I'm spending this week with the quantative developers, or 'quants' as they're called in the business. These are the guys (I don't think they have female quants...) who write all the programmes, spreadsheets and other bits of software for the traders and sales people. Basically, if you need to calculate the risk, volatilty or price of a particular trade or portfolio, you ask a quant and they will come up with an awfully clever way of doing it using a computer.

The three guys who work at RBS Tokyo all come from similar backgrounds to mine - two did engineering degrees and the other has a degree and PhD in physics. It seems to me that many of the scientists who go into finance end up as quants or in research. Quants are the nerds of the financial world, so it makes sense I suppose... The plan for this week is for me to learn some C# programming language and write a programme that will shift data sets around and send them to a pre-programmed Excel spreadsheet. I'm more than happy to get some programming experience as, surprisingly, I don't get taught any coding languages as part of my uni course. I'm hoping that this experience will look good on my application to CERN next year :)

Today was another day of good food. I'm probably going to come home the size of the Buddha at Daibutsu... We went out for lunch at a brilliant Japanese restaurant in my building that specialises in grilled chicken and fish. I opted for the chicken set and was not disappointed:


I got this immaculately presented plate of various grilled and fried bits of chicken, a bowl of rice, pickles, endless cups of tea and a huge bowl of miso that was more like a stew because it had so much extra stuff in it. All in a stunningly decorated restaurant and for £10. Yum yum yum yum... Later on, a colleague came over with ridiculously posh cakes that he had been given by his broker. I couldn't say no to his kind offer and chose this delicious blueberry layered mousse:


For my tea, I got a big bao tze and a giant Thai chicken salad from Daimaru's foodhall. Also on the way home, I stopped at a wee shop that sells bean-paste filled waffle-type-things in the shape of fish.


This is a sweet that is traditionaly from the area of Tokyo that I'm staying in (Nihombashi, I can't remember what the sweet is called though...) and they make them freshly for you.

The (inadvertent) intrepid explorer

It was pouring with rain when I got up on Sunday, so I decided to properly escape Tokyo this time and head for the countryside to try to get away from the bad weather. So I got the train to Kamakura - a rural town about 50 miles south-west, down the coast from Tokyo.

I got there just in time for lunch and hopped into a wee place near the station as the food looked good.


I ordered a set with tempura (prawn and assorted veggies), udon noodles in broth, rice and assorted pickles. Everything was great, and as expected, apart from the rice. I thought I'd ordered a set that came with plain rice but it turned up covered in tiny wee white fish - there were a lot of little eyes staring at me from my bowl...


After polishing my baby fish off, I got the wee electric train further into Kamakura to start my epic temple-hopping. I started of at Hasedera, which is famous for having beautiful grounds and thousands of tiny statues of Jizo.


There is a system of small caves in the hillside, where statues of various gods have been carved out of the walls:


And even smaller statues are placed next to one of them:


It was all absolutely stunning but very sad too - Jizo is the patron of departed children and all the statues have been left by women who have lost children through miscarriage or abortion. The main temple was huge and housed a 9m tall, gilded Buddha (of the standing, skinny variety), but I wasn't allowed to take photos inside :( So here's one of the outside for you.


After wandering around the temple grounds for a while, I headed off to Daibutsu, which is famous for its giant bronze Buddha (this time sitting down and chubby).


I also climbed inside it (from under his bum) to see what he looked like from the inside. Unsurprisingly, it looked like an inside-out, bronze Buddha. It was here that I tried to join the 'Daibutsu Hiking Course'. Now I thought that this would be a nice woodland path that meandered through the hillside forest, connecting the temples and shrines. How wrong I was.

The 'Daibutsu Hiking Course' is aptly named - it should definitely not be attempted at 3 in the afternoon, when it has been raining, while wearing plimsoles and carrying a rather large handbag. Oh, and when it's hot as hell and approximately 100% humidty. The part of the hike from Daibutsu to the nearest temple was supposed to take 20 minutes - it took me the best part of a hour. The path (if you can even call it that...) went steeply up and even more steeply down, was covered in inch-thick, very slippery mud and pretty much felt like I was trekking through a tropical jungle. And the signposts were only in Japanese. The jungle was beautiful but I was so hot and grumpy that I didn't take any pictures until I reached the closest temple. Sasuke-inari jinja has lots of red torii leading up the steps towards the main temple and also has hundreds of statues and figurines of foxes.



I then headed, on the road this time, to Zeniarai-benten. I entered this shrine complex through a tunnel in the hillside which opened out into a gorgeous clearing. This shrine is famous for its natural springs, which run out through caves under the hillside.


I collected some candles insense and a basket from the main building and headed towards the cave - I lit my candles off others, then lit my insense off them, popped my loose change into the basket and made my way to the caves. It's believed that if you wash your money in the springs and then spend it, it will return to you many times over.


So I spent a little at the shrine, praying for financial success and spent the rest on food! I got the food at a wee town fete sort of affair that I stumbled across on my way back to the train station. I got some fried noodles and yakitori from this massive charcoal grill:


My timing was perfect - as soon as I had finished my food and made it onto the platform, the weather caught up with me and it started to pour.

Escaping Tokyo

I spent the afternoon in Yokohama with a colleague and her friend from university. Yokohama actually isn't much of an escape from the metropolis of Tokyo as it sort of joins on, but is a city in its own right. We got the train there and just wandered around.

We spent a lot of time in China Town - it's the biggest China Town in Japan and certainly the biggest I've ever visited. There were some lovely, very colourful temples and lots and lots of restaurants and food stalls that sold different dim sum and bao tze. Of course, I sampled a few of them (temples and food, that is...).





Yokohama is famous for it's port and this year is celebrating its 150th anniversary. There were a few different events set up, a massive cruise liner anchored in the dock and loads of images of Yokohama's mascot, who appeared to be a potato in a boat.


We came across a few more unusual characters, including a Japanese Colonal Sanders outside KFC.


Tonight was the annual hanabi (fireworks) festival, so I found a wee space to sit (it was so crowded with people!) in one of the parks on the coast and watched the show. Even though I was about 1km away from where the fireworks were actually going off, it was absolutely amazing - I got a fantastic view over the top of the cruise liner in the harbour. They were some of the best fireworks I've ever seen. Every shape and colour imaginable, most of them changing colour three or four times, and on an absolutely huge scale. They went on for well over an hour and were gigantic!



It was a bit mental getting the train back as the thousands of other people who had been out for the hanabi were doing exactly the same thing. Thankfully I brought home an extra large bao tze to snack on when I got in.


Although I did make the mistake of buying a rather dubiously named drink from a vending machine, thinking that it was water, only to find out that it's some strange isotonic thing with a label that reads:


"Pocari Sweat is a healthy beverage that smoothly supplies the lost water and electrolytes during perspiration. With the appropriate density and electrolytes, close to that of human body fluid, it can be easily absorbed into the body."

They make it sound so appetising... It tastes absolutely foul and will now be sitting in my fridge until I'm really desperate for an 'ion supply drink'.

Kimcheeeeeee

Friday was a day of food. I have never consumed so much in one day in my life. I just kept telling myself that I was making up for hardly being able to eat anything when I was ill :)

I got taken out for lunch again to Benihanas for some tepanyaki. We sat around a huge hot plate and our own chef came along and fried Japanese tenderloin steak and beansprouts right in front of us - it was brilliant!


We got given delicious sauces to dip our steak in too and they made us wear paper bibs, just in case any of the food splashes up while the chef is cooking.


After work, I went out for dinner with people I had been working with last week. We headed out to a really good Korean restaurant in Akasaka - one of the credit guys is Korean and he apparently only eats there. This was great for us as he knew exactly what to order and we got loads of freebies too! Including free fried tongue, which I had no idea what type of animal it had previously belonged to. I tried kimchee for the first time and I am now a massive fan. Kimchee is smelly, spicy, fermented Korean cabbage and it's fantastic. I didn't take any photos of the food as there were so many different dishes, I would still be there taking pictures now...

We all headed out for some karaoke after stuffing our faces and I'm pretty sure the booth we were in would have smelt of kimchee after we left.