Now, where was I up to? Oh, that’s right, it was the weekend of the kiln matsuri and, yes, we did visit all the other nearby potteries on the Sunday. Again there were some very interesting items; some expensive, some not so expensive. We bought a lovely vase from one pottery (for the tokonoma of one of our rooms), which cost ¥2,000 and they thanked us by giving us two lovely tea cups (Japanese style)😊.

The last place on the trail turned out to be the gymnasium at the local primary school, where there were stalls set up for all of the potteries, so we got to see all of the different styles together in one place. We also saw the lovely man from the pottery where they served us tea and mochi, and he rushed over to us to say hello then told the nearby people who we were, which was nice.

One of the potteries we went to had five kilns, ranging in size from very large down to almost an esky sized one. The pots/works they produced were a real mix of amazing through to fairly mundane and varied in price significantly. They were very friendly and allowed us to go into the room where all of the kilns were housed – yes, it was more like a warehouse than a room.

On the Monday, the first of our friends from taiko arrived. She had done the first week of the taiko workshop in Fukui and then stayed with us for four nights. She managed to fit a lot of sightseeing into those four days and we very much enjoyed her company – thanks Yve for staying with us and we look forward to seeing some of the art you produce in the future.

On one of the days Yve was here, we went down to the nearby shops to purchase some supplies. As we turned into one of the many deadend streets near the shops, we noticed an unusual car driving towards the end. It was one of the Google camera cars, obviously taking photos of this street. Naturally, we had to take some photos of it and are also now wondering if we will be in any of the photos for this street!! We are also hoping that it drove down our street, so that it might show up on Google maps in the near future.

During that week the weather was mostly very nice, so it gave me a chance to sit out on the back deck on a couple of days, which I have been wanting to do since we moved in – I had missed sitting outside enjoying the warmth and doing some nature watching. In the case of our new backyard, the stone wall provides not only a nice background but it is also home for numerous skinks, which range in size up to around 20 cms. There seem to be three different colours – a brass/gold colour, a greenish dark bronze and what I have dubbed the rainbow skink. A lovely way to spend some time relaxing!

In terms of the weather, the maximum temperature is now varying between 18C and 30C, with some lovely sunny days, some cloudy and some quite wet days, where it basically rains all day. The really good news is that I have been able to wear a t-shirt and sandals for the first time this year 😊.

The day after Yve left us, another two friends who had been attending the Fukui taiko workshop arrived. The day after they arrived, two other people from Fukui came to visit Kyoto for the day. One of these people was Nicole, who is one of the teachers from the taiko group we used to play with in Adelaide and who had been taking the workshop in Fukui. The other person who came with her was a lovely, funny woman from the UK. They came up to see our new abode and then we took all four out for a walk along the foothills to see the old shopping area and the temples along the way.

It is amazing how many temples and shrines there are along the length of the Higashiyama foothills and into the Fushimi area. You can literally walk in either the north or south direction from our house and find a temple or shrine within five to ten minutes. There are walks mapped out which are available from tourist centres, although they do charge for some of them.

Ironically, at one point we could hear a taiko drum being played, so had to go see where it was and who was playing. It was just a single, large drum inside a building which housed some Buddhist murals and I suspect the man was playing occasionally to attract attention to the building. We tried to get Nicole to play a piece but she said she was taiko’d out and, honestly, I couldn’t blame her!!

The next day we took Steven and Jenny (our friends) to see Mt Hiei (known as the mother mountain) which is near Kyoto, although in the next prefecture over. Enryakuji temple is near the top of the mountain and is where the Tendai sect of Buddhism was founded in 788 CE. It has an interesting history and, at its peak, Enryakuji had around 3,000 sub-temples and a powerful army of warrior monks who often engaged in power struggles with other monasteries and political leaders. That is until the warlord Nobunaga laid siege to the mountain in 1571 and slaughtered all those living on the mountain, then razed the temple complex. Today, the complex consists of around 100 buildings and it really is a beautiful setting.

After this big adventure, they did their own thing for the next two days, including more antiques shopping at the Kitano Tenmangu shrine – both ended up with many finds and were happy with their purchases! On the Thursday, Jenny departed Kyoto, to go stay with her son and his family here in Japan. The next day we took Steven on a walk from our house on one of the above mentioned walks, through to Fushimi Inari. We had never done this walk, but we had seen a signpost near our house and were itching to try it out.

The walk was great, taking us through lush green areas, pass a couple of temples we have never been to and up the hill to enter the Fushimi Inari area from fairly high up on the mountain. The last part of the walk was very steep, but in some ways was easier than climbing the multitude stairs that form the Fushimi Inari trail. Also, there were very few people taking this walk, so it was much quieter, without the push and shove that can be the case when walking the lower part of the Fushimi Inari trail.

We plan to do this walk again by ourselves, so we can take suitable photos to create a walking sheet with directions for our guests. We also want to take time to go into the temples along the way, since they are close – in the neighbourhood, so to speak!

After we left Fushimi Inari we went to an area within the Fushimi ward where there are some sake breweries, but I am going to leave that until my next blog…stay tuned!!!

On a final note, we are still waiting, waiting, waiting for our hotel licence…(sigh). Maybe there will be more news on that front next time I sit down in front of this keyboard. We had hoped for a 1 May start, however, we keep finding out about further new requirements before we can get our licence – the latest being that we have to contract a commercial garbage collection company and provide their name to the authorities, even though we haven’t got our licence and so can’t officially open yet. We are hoping it won’t be too expensive to have collections, especially when we just don’t need them. There is no doubt they are putting as many obstacles as possible in the path of those applying for a licence for a minpaku listed on Airbnb.

So, that’s it for now – as always with fingers crossed…

Cheers!!

Peonies, wisteria, rhododendrons and the bamboo is popping!!!

 It’s a crane fly (not a huge mosquito)

 !

 Inoshishi (me)

 quack, quack, quack at Sherry Bar

Well, it seems that as much as I haven’t really planned this, I have now fallen into a bi-weekly posting routine. I suspect that, in the long term, this will continue unless there is something really newsworthy that I just have to report, like say we finally get our hotel licence, or we have our first full house (once we actually have our licence, of course).

So, what has happened in the last two weeks??? We continue to make progress in other areas, which is still important to reflect on. Firstly, though, what’s with the weather? Heatwaves in Adelaide in April and here, in Kyoto, the weather is bouncing around – warm, sunny and lovely one day, cool and cloudy the next, then windy with reasonably heavy rain. No thunderstorms yet, but I wait patiently (although, if it’s going to rain, why can’t we have some thunder and lightning, just to ramp things up a bit?).

The blossom is well and truly over. Lyndie and Tim were lucky to be here just as it came, and went. While the bloom seemed very quick this year, it was apparently much more intense, ie there were more blossoms on the trees than the average. It may well be the combination of the early warmth, then the wind and rain that brought this about. So, we are now into the azalea bloom, with the many hundreds of plants gradually coming into flower. There are also many grape hyacinth, tulips and daffodils around the streets, mainly in pots.

Our friends left Kyoto for other cities and then home last week, giving us time to reflect on how well we can cope with timing arrivals and departures, cleaning between stays, and, of course, how the breakfasts went, both in timing and in quality. We have realised that we will have to have a dryer in our laundry once business picks up (and when we can afford it…), however, other than that the actual cleaning wasn’t overly onerous.

In terms of food, we were reasonably happy with what we served up, but there is always room for improvement and we will also need to change our offerings as we move through the seasons and the available produce changes. We are going to make time to sit down with Takako in the near future and ‘workshop’ what we can cook and design some different daily menus. Any foods that we can prepare, or at least partially prepare the afternoon or night before certainly make life easier.

We have decided that, unless it is absolutely essential to serve earlier (such as for early train journeys), breakfast will be served between 8:00 and 9:00am. Craig also put together some ‘takeout’ breakfasts to take on those early train rides, which was appreciated. In the next two weeks we have some friends arriving from the Fukui taiko workshops to stay with us, which we are looking forward to. This will give us more pre-official opening practice time.

Progress has definitely been made on the unpacking/arranging/re-arranging front, with all boxes now unpacked!!! Yes, even the guilty secret storage room is now just storage room number 2. The cardboard room (aka guest room 2), is still the cardboard room, but we hope to have the empties collected in the next week. Our spare room is now more like a large walk in wardrobe, but at least there everything is out and I now have more choice in what to wear 😊.

On Friday, as we were returning from an outing, we noticed some men putting some banners along the roads in our area, which had ‘kiln matsuri’ written on them (in Japanese, of course). Yesterday, when we went out to do some shopping we noticed people wandering around the streets and so decided to wander around ourselves. I think I have mentioned before our neighbourhood is home to some Kiyomizu-yaki kilns. All pottery made in Kyoto is referred to as Kyo-yaki or Kiyomizu-yaki, more commonly the latter.

It turns out that we have 14 potteries located within 5 minutes walk of our home and yesterday we visited seven of them. One is located nearly directly across the road from us, and another sits atop the wall that lines our backyard. In fact, the two kilns (one electric and one gas) of the latter pottery are located right above our yard. Each of the potteries produces different works in terms of patterns and colours, although there are some dominant themes, such as the indigo designs. We actually saw some items decorated in the willow pattern yesterday.

It was fantastic going into each of the workshops and seeing the greenware, as well as the finished product. I must say, though, that these places are fairly rudimentary in terms of comfort for those working there. Many had bare floors and didn’t seem to have much in the way of heating or cooling. I have also noticed that there are lots of broken pottery pieces lying around these premises, including the pottery across the road from us. The other day when I was doing some weeding in the backyard it was like an archaeological dig and I now have a ‘finds’ area.

At two of the potteries there was someone who could speak some English, and combined with our small Japanese vocabulary, we were able to learn some more about their wares. At the first of these two I had looked at the final product and was then looking at the greenware and, noticing my interest, they got one of the partially finished bowls and a fully fired version and put them together for us to look at. They said that these bowls were fired twice, and they used iron oxides to make some of the colour.

After this they sat us down and served us tea and mochi, which was very nice!! A lot of the product that they produced appeared much more hand made than some of the other potteries. It was very nice work and I really did like it. We told the owners who we were (ie the new people in the area who have built the minshuku, which they knew about) and they were very welcoming and very nice.

After this I wanted to find the pottery that backs onto us and ended up not only finding them, but spending over an hour there. They were lovely people and it just happened that a near neighbour was nearby who spoke very good English and was interested in talking to us, so we were able to have quite a lengthy conversation with them all. At one point I asked where the actual kiln was and the next thing we were taken on a full tour of the pottery. It is a very large complex, and they make both moulded and hand thrown products. We also found out that the male owner sometimes plays in a Beatles cover band (as John Lennon) and he has said we have to see them play next time they perform.

They also said they would like to eat at our restaurant (a misunderstanding about the restaurant licence and what we are going to be serving) – so, we have sort of promised to cook for them one day! Perhaps we will make a  brunch or lunch for them. The English speaking neighbour was also keen to try out our food. All in all, it was an excellent way to meet some of our neighbours and learn more about our area. We are considering going to visit the other seven potteries today.

It seems there is always something new and interesting to discover here!!!

Cheers for now

Just a building near our backyard

A plant that is in our back yard – not sure what it is

…and what is this???

I’m trying to sleep!!!

Hello everyone! Here I am again, finally finding time to sit down, think about what we have been doing and imparting the more interesting/entertaining/important activities and issues we have undertaken and encountered.

Firstly, some good news regarding a couple of issues we had last posting time: we found the legs for my beloved coffee table and we found the missing eggshell china cup from the tea set my mother gave me 😊. This, as you can imagine, made me very happy. The trunk on the elephant, however, is still broken/badly repaired, no matter how much I wish for it to be otherwise.

The weather has now definitely moved into spring mode, with most days now above 20C. As a result, the blossom has opened fully and, as of today, it is definitely looking like it is going to be finished in the next few days. We took a walk down Kiyamachi dori today and it was literally snowing blossom petals, quite heavily at times when the wind picked up. So, I suspect there will be many disappointed people who arrive in Kyoto in the coming weeks hoping for blossom viewing.

On the home front, we have been working our way through the multitude boxes of ‘personal effects’ and struggling to find places for everything. It has been a process of arranging, then rearranging, then rearranging again. Unfortunately, the cupboards don’t get any bigger but we are getting most things in there – we just have to be careful when opening some doors…actually, it’s more like hoping the shelves and drawers don’t buckle under the weight.

We are down to two boxes of glassware in our spare room and the guilty secret storeroom/cupboard upstairs, which may remain a guilty secret for a while yet. We now also have another area which should be an empty guest room (no. 2) but is actually currently disposed as a cardboard room, full of empty boxes and boxes full of wrapping paper. The amount of paper that was used to wrap our items is mindboggling. A significant amount of the time we are spending emptying boxes is spent on the process of unwrapping then trying to flatten the paper and put it in some of the empty boxes. A substantial amount of the weight of our items in transport would just have been paper.

In terms of our minshuku, there is no further news on the hotel licence front, however, we have officially received our restaurant licence. So, we continue to wait. In the meantime, we currently have some friends staying here, who are very kindly acting as guinea pigs as we put into practice what we are hoping to do when we are fully functioning. The first day that Lyndie and Tim were here we didn’t have any furniture in the dining room, so we ad-libbed by using our outdoor furniture to seat them for breakfast.

Later that day, we had the delivery of the first phase of the dining room furniture (which basically means that’s all we could afford at the time…). We are very happy with how it looks and hope we can add to it in the near future. A few days later our pleated curtains (I would call them blinds, but our builder has called them pleated curtains) and standard curtains arrived. Gradually it is all coming together and it is looking better and better. Craig has also been busy putting up picture hooks so we can further decorate the spaces we have with various paintings/prints/items. Unfortunately the hardware store ran out of hooks, so we have to wait until they replenish their stocks to finish this.

We are now awaiting the inbuilt seating bench in the dining room so we can remove the two outdoors chairs and have enough seating for up to five people in the dining room without the use of stand-in furniture!! The process of preparing and serving breakfast has been a change for us, because we are more used to preparing and serving dinners for people, but it just means we are doing some of the prep work the afternoon before. Craig is enjoying making use of all the Japanese cookbooks we have – he is much more a ‘to the recipe’ cook than I am, so it suits him well. Having a rice cooker certainly makes things easier in the morning, rather than having to do it manually.

We started with Lyndie and Tim staying with us and now we have another friend staying here, so it is three for breakfast, which isn’t that much more work just more ingredients!! It has been very helpful for us, and in a way it is a good thing that we are easing into the daily process of serving guests rather than full tilt into the peak season. We are very much enjoying the company of other people, especially such nice people, and are very grateful for their indulgence! Next month we have more friends from Adelaide coming to stay, after they have attended the taiko workshop in Fukui, which we are looking forward to.

In terms of our ability to completely finish the fitout of the minshuku, we are still awaiting the sale of our flat, but unfortunately we still haven’t had any serious bites. We remain hopeful…At the moment we have enough in place for our current needs and we will add to what we have as needed and as money allows. We are getting somewhat used to the just-in-time way things are panning out for us.

Before I sign off, I just want to acknowledge the passing of Stephen Hawking, which I omitted last time. If there ever was a role model of perseverance against the odds, he is it. A great mind, with the ability to communicate his understanding to those of us who are not physicists and all through a range of technologies he was connected to. Vale Stephen.

Cheers for now

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 just a nice wall

 my new car…;-)

 happy easter!

 another new friend

Serena enjoys the window sill