While in Kyoto, the kids played the kimono game. The first iteration of the game involved awarding a point to the first child to spot a kimono. It pretty quickly devolved into an unpleasant mess of arguments about who spotted which kimono first and whether or not the purple kimono child A just spotted was the same one as the purple kimono for which child B had already received a point. The kimono game take 2 was much more successful. In this game, the group collaborated to count as many kimonos as possible. By the end of our day in Kyoto, they had surpassed 200. That's probably about 190 more people in kimonos than we saw on the rest of our trip combined. Outside of Kyoto, we saw only a handful of people actually wearing kimonos.
We were also on the constant lookout for cherry blossoms--along with every other tourist in Kyoto. This was a side street off the main tourist drag down the mountain from the Kiyomizu-dera temple. Most of the side streets looked like what you would expect in a tourist area: people, certainly, but not crowds. This side street, however, had a cherry tree in full blossom.
Before visiting Japan, we knew that Japanese cherry blossoms were a big deal, but we didn't quite realize just what a Big Deal they actually are in Japan. The TV news had cherry blossom coverage, with maps that looked like weather maps tracking the progress of blooming from south to north. We saw reporters on the scene, covering impressive or early blooms. At one point, Kevin excitedly commented that the news was showing a blooming tree in the next town over, which meant that they would probably be blooming in Gifu soon. The spot included man-on-the street interviews with people excitedly observing a single blooming cherry tree, the first in their town.
No comments:
Post a Comment