Kyoto, Nara, and Random OBservations

So prior to New Years I visited Kyoto with Miron and his Japanese girlfriend, Rocky. Rocky is short for something, something longer I'm assuming. Kyoto looks like Park City minus the film-festival, a little town at the foot of a mountain. And if you climb that mountain you can see Monkeys! Running in the wild. This is why they call it Monkey Mountain. Monkeys are cool.



Did you know that the starting price to buy a cat here is $85? And I don't mean pedigree, I mean the same cats that get offed daily in pro-kill shelters all across America. A puppy? $1,200.



I find myself forgetting I'm in Japan when I'm hanging out with Miron and his English-Speaking friends, drinking, chatting, trading The Office quotes, what-have-you. Then we all leave the dormitory and hop on a Subway headed for somewhere and all-of-a-sudden I'm surrounded by Japanese people. It's always shocking. I also can't get over that I'm speaking a foreign language when I converse in English. I always think of the people chattering away in Chinese on the El in Chicago and realize that I'm now that person.



So I went to Nara, Nara is one of the oldest cities in Japan. It was founded in 700 AD and is the home of the Great Buddha an enormous Bronze statue of the Buddha that boggles the mind as to how ancient people cast such a thing. It is housed in the biggest temple in Japan. Actually it might not be the biggest temple in Japan but I doubt I'll see a bigger one. Anyway, it's as big as all those old antiquitites that you can't believe how big they are are.



The only other foreign country I've been to is Scotland (not all that foreign, in that they speak english and drink a lot). One thing I love about going to foreign countries is pocket change, since all other countries have coins for the dollar and even a five dollar coin here, your pocket always gets filled up with change in foreign country. We should do away with the dollar and go to the dollar coin in American. Oh, I know, we "have" the dollar coin, but we don't. The problem is the Dollar coin is being used as a liberal propaganda platform with an Indian or a Women's Suffrage Leader on the coin. That's bullshit, nobody's going to buy into that. Tell you what, put Reagan on the Dollar coin and see how quickly congress makes that and the elimination of the dollar bill happen. The Republicans haven't gotten their way in a month, give it to them. I love the veneration of Reagan (the Lenin of the Conservative Revolution) by the Republicans, but also the hesitancy of those same Republicans to state in any way that W (the Stalin of the Conservative Revolution) is the heir to that legacy. Because he sucks and they know it. Feels like America's living under a Czar, Bush II, Henry V, Reagan III.



Oops, talking about Bush from a country with an Emperor, that's my cue, I'm going to go get coffee in a metal can from a machine and cigarettes from a machine and go to Universal Studios Japan so I can go on a lot of non-subtititled video event rides.



shinsaibashi,



adw