Author: Nick Fryer
-
The Red Gates
Day 9 – Saturday, 6 April 2024 Fushimi Inari Taisha is very, very famous, making any alleged joke that I might insert here about it sounding like one element of a sushi platter fatuous and ignorant. It sits at the bottom of Mount Inari and the path from the temple complex to the top is…
-
Offal and Engagement
Day 8 – Friday, 5 April 2024 A day of tourist highlights: the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, the gardens of Okochi Sanso, Ryōan-ji and the golden temple of Kinkaku-ji. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. After a nap, I set out to poke around the neighbourhood in which we’re staying, just west of Yamashina subway…
-
Wedged next to Kimonos
Day 7 – Thursday, 4 April 2024 A slow start with some shopping and coffee and cake, the last from a patisserie that hands over its signature items in a little card box with a couple of ice packs in it (this on a 20 degree day) to make sure that your glazed apple absurdity…
-
Shrine, Sky Building, Shinkansen and Shochu
Day 6 – Wednesday, 3 April 2024 Woke to the first real rain in Japan. While packing carried on around me, I turned on the television in a moment of idle curiosity to find, between the inevitable morning advertorials for products I couldn’t identify, let alone decide I needed, wall to wall tsunami warnings for…
-
Osaka-jō and a Snorey Foot Massage
Day 5 – Tuesday, 2 April 2024 Barely any sleep on the overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Osaka. The train in from Kansai Osaka Airport to Osaka Namba at 6.40am slowly filled up with commuters looking even more zoned out than I was. Seb napped a bit as the carriage filled up – “filled”…
-
A Religious Experience
Day 4 – Monday, 1 April 2024 After a breakfast of French toast (Anna) and stealing bits of French toast off Anna’s plate (the rest of us), we packed up, left our bags with our hotel (Aloft KL Sentral, a solid recommendation), and went where we could not, on our last swing past, the National…
-
Ascension with Monkeys
Day 3 – Sunday, 31 March 2024 The only sensible thing to do, when the heat and humidity mean walking a hundred metres on flat ground leaves you panting and slimy, is instead to walk a hundred metres up a nearly vertical staircase to a large cave, then down some other steps, up some more,…
-
Timing is Everything
Day 2 – Saturday, 30 March 2024 Google knows shit about walking around Kuala Lumpur. This is understandable, because it is precisely the sort of problem computers are shit at. There are no footpaths, barely any along the actual roads. People actually walk, when they walk, which is probably not often, down little gaps between…
-
Being Boeing
Day 1 – Friday, 29 March 2024 Foreignness started quickly. In the queue ahead of us to get through international screening was a group – presumably a class – of Japanese high school kids, a couple of bunches of boys and perhaps twenty girls. All were in uniform, the rule presumably being enforced to ensure…
-
Vestments
Tuesday, 20 December 2022 to Thursday, 22 December 2022 The Victoria and Albert Museum, to look at clothes behind glass, mostly, and then to King’s Road, to do the same. I’d never been to the V&A before, but knew its reputation and was unsurprised to be most interested in the textiles, if a little disappointed…