…and so I find myself in front of the keyboard again, wondering how to start…

Hi all, after yet another slight hiatus, here I am again bringing you all up to date with what has been happening this week in Kyoto – except it’s two weeks since my last transmission, so it should be these weeks in Kyoto. The main reason for the delay this time is that we only have one laptop on which to undertake larger tasks such as long emails, blogging and developing websites. During this period we have been putting together as much as we can for our minshuku website, hence the laptop has been fully occupied unless we are out.

In relation to our website, we are very close now to being able to ‘go live’, with a few minor edits to undertake and we have to open a bank account for our company before we can create a PayPal account to accept deposits for bookings. Hopefully we will have this completed by the end of this week. After we publish the site, we will also be creating a Facebook page to start our marketing effort. Then we start putting the word out and hoping for bookings.

On the other front, the construction of our house/minshuku is moving apace. In the last two weeks, the foundations have been finished. Quite a complicated process, involving three pours and lots of reo and formwork. As of my last post, the first pour into the base of the earthworks had occurred and the reo was being put on top of that. After it was completed some formwork was put around the reo to frame the edges. Then the second pour occurred.

I thought that would be it but when we went up to The Block a few days later some further formwork had been put on top of that to create bases for the walls of our structure and, in fact, the third pour had already occurred! Before work started at The Block, we had been told that the foundations would have to be inspected and approved by the authorities before anything further happened. So, I thought there would be a longish delay between them being finished and the framework starting…however, we received an email on the weekend indicating that the framework should be fully completed by the 7^th – ie this Thursday!!!!!!

Yesterday (Monday), we went up to see how far along they were and found around ten men working feverishly attaching the base beams to the foundations and building scaffolding around the entire base, which is over two storeys high. A screen will then be put around the whole scaffolding structure – in fact they were already starting to attach the screen when we got there. Having watched a new home being built across the road from our house in Adelaide, I am astounded at how fast this is all proceeding. We have been invited to visit the structure on Thursday, to have a look inside. Apparently you would normally have a framework raising ceremony at this time, but they indicated that it would be expensive, so said they weren’t planning one. It seems it is a Shinto ceremony, at which a Shinto priest officiates.

(our name printed on pre-formed beams!)

One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is the weather!!!! We had been having a run of days of 35 or more (and humid…) for the last few weeks and it was getting harder to go out knowing that it you would become a walking puddle almost immediately. The 30^th was yet again 35C and it seemed that it might just continue on for a while…then, on the 31^st, it was around 31C and it has been hovering around that temperature ever since! A very sudden change and it really does make it easier to face going out shopping, etc. Lovely. We have been able to open the windows at night to let fresh air in and we haven’t had the air cons on all night!!

(Serena thinks it’s hot)

We did undertake one ‘touristy’ outing during this period, despite the heat/humidity, and it was certainly worth it. We went to another shrine we had never been to, which involved a train ride, short walk and then a longer bus ride to get there (the reason we hadn’t been before). The shrine was built in 947CE by the then emperor in honour of a well known scholar and politician, Sugawara no Michizane. In 986CE, he was deified, with this being the first shrine in Japan to enshrine a person as a deity. Sugawara no Michizane was a prodigy child, able to read poetry at five years of age. He was writing poetry in Chinese at the age of 11. As a result, he is best known as the god of academics.

There are many cows in this shrine, as cows are believed to be messengers of the gods and it seems there may have been a connection between Sugawara no Michizane and cows. As a result, students who visit this shrine to pray to Tenjin (as the deified Sugawara no Michizane is known) for good results also seek out the cows to assist them. Generally, this takes the form of rubbing the head of the cow and then touching their own heads.

The shrine sits on a huge block of land and incorporates many buildings and a large garden. There are nearly 2,000 plum blossom trees (this being Tenjin’s favourite tree – apparently he wrote a haiku at the age of 5 about the plum blossom) along with around 300 maple trees. As a result, the shrine is one of the recommended places to visit during blossom time and in Autumn. One thing that drew my attention is the carvings around the base of the roof line on the rear and sides of the main hall. They are very intricate, highly coloured and are beautiful. They remind me of the carvings on one of the buildings in the temple and shrine complex at Nikko.

I have nothing in particular to report from the land of tv this post, in part because we haven’t seen as much tv recently, being occupied with the website and other issues, such as finding an accounting package I can use for the minshuku. It seems these days that you can’t buy accounting software as a one off purchase. All products appear to now be online, with a monthly fee attached.

Well, that’s about it for this post – there’s just one final item, the name we have decided for our minshuku:

Vegan Minshuku Sanbiki Neko

Sanbiki Neko translates as 3 cats. We felt we had to include them somehow, especially since the architect included them in all the iterations of our building plans.

Cheers!

(here’s a photo of me! Well, my tiger striped feet, anyway)