Japan day 8

April 8 - We had the day to ourselves today so we had a late breakfast and started getting organized for tomorrow when we leave. The weather has perked up considerably - sunshine and much warmer than yesterday. Kyoto is much less of an international city than Tokyo e.g. no English language TV stations and almost no readily available tourist information in English. Since we were mainly on a tour here, I hadn’t done much homework and didn’t have a guidebook, but I had picked up a French brochure yesterday and was able to figure out that one of the Geisha schools puts on a music and dance recital every day in April. Since we are both completely museumed- and shrined-out, this sounded like a good thing to do. The theatre turned out to be in the Gion area which is within easy walking distance of our hotel, but Hartley was bound and determined that we were going to ride the subway in Kyoto, so off we went. In Tokyo, all the subway information was in Japanese and English, but not so here. We stood looking lost in front of the automatic ticket machine until a nice Japanese man came along to help. He didn’t speak any English but we showed him where we wanted to go and he helped us with the tickets. Then a nice train conductor told us which platform to go to, so we managed to arrive intact! A map has been our constant companion in Japan as Mabel won’t work here (our GPS lady) and we found our way to the Gion area which was quite fascinating. It’s one of the older parts of Kyoto with many old buildings and little alleyways that lead who knows where. It seems that almost every doorway leads to a restaurant! We found the theatre and bought our tickets for later in the afternoon and then we were stopped by a French family who had seen us looking at our map. They were looking for a very beautiful area where a little river runs through Gion and there are lots of tiny bridges and of course, cherry blossoms. So we poured over the map together and John and I decided that it sounded like a hopeful area for us to look at too, so off we went. It really was quite lovely and we found a nice little restaurant for lunch. We wandered back to the theatre again for an extraordinary experience. It was extremely professional with incredible costumes (all Geisha-type with incredibly rich fabrics and intricate head-dresses). The performance took an hour and there were 8 scenes which took us through the year from spring - spring. The music was provided by ladies playing drums, flutes and shamishens (the guitar-things which they play with huge picks) and singing. Of course the music is very strange to our western ears (Christie would be amazed at some of the things they can do with their voices!) And the dancing is all very ritualized. The dancers were amazing, completely in unison with their fans, stamping their feet and graceful movements. The scenery also was wonderful with parts of the stage popping up with dancers and scenery. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take photographs inside the theatre - but there are some good pictures in the brochure I have.