The Custard Journal, Day 5

Kyoto, 05/09/2019

An orange crab,
jumps the palace moat.
Sequential panels.

The walking of the previous days took its toll apparently. Sleeping hard and waking up around 11am, the day would be as it started. Slow and lazy. Since last afternoon, the french toast and coffee combo of efish was constantly popping up in my thoughts, so I really had no choice as to where the day would start. Ordering some sandwiches on top, our breakfast turned into a feast. This would soon prove a mistake. After leaving the cafe, we strolled aimlessly around the new part of town doing some shopping. The highlight was B-Side label, a design store great for memorabilia and small gifts. We left with a bundle of stickers, magnets and t-shirts to be split among ourselves and friends.

Just a few minutes walk away is Nishiki, the main market of Kyoto. It is five blocks long and you can find anything from hand-crafted knives to hand-painted handheld fans displaying gorgeous Japanese themes. But the main reason to visit Nishiki must be its culinary delights and challenges. Roasted sparrows, eel innards, huge oysters, pickled vegetables. This is when the breakfast feast proved a mistake, because I wanted to try everything but just couldn’t. The best I could do was a variety of dry fish, some caramelized crabs and a handful of wakame sesame chips. Note for future self, go with an empty stomach.

Defeated, we made our way to the Kyoto international manga museum. Housed in a school building, which may well still be functioning for all I know, the museum is mostly a library and reading space. In the central room, manga series were ordered by publication year in wall to wall bookshelves and you could just pick up any volume, sit down on a pillow and read. There are probably people that spend whole days here going through the vast collection. Instead of showcasing whatever the curator deems important, the approach is closer to here is everything, read and figure out for yourself what this is all about. There are some art exhibitions and a few museum pieces in the traditional sense as well, but my understanding is that people mainly visit the place to read. Could this approach work in other settings as well. My experience suggests that we should experiment more with it. There are also shelves with comics from around the world, organized by country of original publication, and translated issues for international visitors like us. I picked up the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga, which I knew had a much bleaker and more complicated resolution than the movie and spent some time exploring it.

After our time at the museum, we failed miserably to do more sightseeing. When we got to Nijo Castle it was already closed and the same was true for the Imperial Palace. Only thing we could do was admire their roofs from the outside. There is a very narrow water canal around the palace and unless you want to accidentaly trigger the alarm to the whole place and have guards come after you, I suggest to not step on the wall-adjacent side of that canal. Speaking from personal experience, its less scary than it sounds. Accepting our situation, we got ice coffee from a vending machine and spent some time at the surrounding park. When we finally felt hungry again, we visited a Japanese barbeque place, where we barely touched perfect fatty wagyu slices on the grill before gulping them down with ice cold Asahi beer. Getting a few more beer cans and some custard puffs from the great Japanese institution that is the convenience store, we went back to our room early and stayed in.

For Day 4, Kyoto here.

Note: there are no affiliations of any kind, all places mentioned are places I enjoyed and recommend without their knowledge