Sep
28
Arashiyama Revisited
Filed Under Newspost
Easy like Sunday Morning
I hadn’t planned to do anything on Sunday, but Visa was going to Kyoto with a few Japanese acquaintances and had asked Henrik and me along earlier during the week. I had originally agreed to go, but after staying awake until 3 am on Saturday, I had chosen the path of sleep instead. Fortunately, Visa didn’t readily agree to my selfish change of plans and kept calling both our keitais a few times on Sunday morning until I was ready to wake up (2 hours later than what had been planned). Thus we went to Kyoto, met up with Visa & the girls and went to take some purikura pictures. After all the important procedures were over, we headed for Arashiyama-district, more specifically the Iwatayama Monkey Park. Going to Kyoto to visit temples had become a standard of sorts, so going there to see monkeys instead immediately heightened my interest.
Who’s been touching these monkeys?
By the time we got to Arashiyama I was getting really hungry and decided to Gaijin Smash through the behavioral norms by buying a hot dog and some fries from the nearby konbini and eating them on the run. Mind you, eating in public is frowned upon in Japan. It’s just not supposed to be done. Ever. However, cultural norms don’t come between me and food. That’s my policy. Eventually we arrived at the monkey park entrance. The admission cost ¥550 and included a map of the area, as well as an important notice concerning the monkeys:
-Don’t stare at the monkeys in the eye
-Don’t touch the monkeys.
-Don’t feed them outside
The first thing not to do would never have crossed my mind had it not been written down, but after reading it I got an irresistible urge to actually try staring them straight in the eye. The walk up the hill to the monkey residence was long, though, and my dementia kicked in long before getting to the top so I forgot to accomplish my mission. The path consisted of many sets of stairs, a few mountain slopes, stairs again and so on… The girls were getting a bit tired of the uphill walking in high heels and considered giving up when suddenly, monkeys! Thousands of them! Well not thousands, but once we arrived to a certain point on the mountain path, we realized that the surrounding forest had become infested by monkeys. I immediately started taking pictures but was soon disrupted when a baby monkey tried to climb my leg. I wasn’t ninja enough to get a picture before he ran away realizing I wasn’t a tree. However, he soon came back and tried to chew on my shoe. Bad idea. I wonder if that one is still alive. I mean, my socks could probably melt someone’s face off and he was chewing on the unholy shoe.
We stayed on the top of the hill for about half an hour, taking hundreds of pictures, a few videos, feeding the monkeys inside the very commercial “feeding shack” and watching a random guy shooting some badly behaving monkeys with his slingshot. I wonder what kind of academic degree you need for that kind of work, especially since the monkey-shooting didn’t seem to follow any specific pattern at all. He just shot them once in a while for good measure. The career path of my dreams.
I guess I could babble on and on about the monkey park but I have other matters to attend so enjoy the pictures and wallow in jealousy.
-Antti