Imperial, shmimperial, I'm the freakin' Shogun!

And away we went, riding our trusty (or is that rusty?) steeds towards the palace to rescue the Princess Fiona. But first we stopped alongside the lovely river that runs through Kyoto to call Mikey for his 24th birthday. Whoohooo!
The river:



On the phone with Mikey:

and another pic by the river that's just cool. click on it for a full size, if you didn't know that...

We rode on, hoping to be able to get "permission" to go on a free tour of the Imperial Palace Grounds. You have to apply, which means filling out a form. We had tried online, but it said it was completely full. Figuring we had a chance anyway, we went to the Imperial Household Agency and gave it our best shot. After much cajoling, bribery, and finally just filling out the form, we were given permission for the 2 o'clock tour. This gave us enough time to go to the tofuya, or tofu shop that the owner of the restaurant had told us to stop into.
Sweet.
Or neutral, as tofu tends to be. We rode over there, and found it pretty easily, not something that seems to happen a lot, especially when using the Lonely Planet guide. Have I mentioned that their maps are really bad? And that the addresses they give tend not to be right? Well, it deserves mentioning again.
We managed to make ourselves understood to the tofu makers, and they were pretty impressed with the fact that I was willing to part with Miriam for so few soybeans. After a few more tries, they understood that I was actually telling them that my father used to make tofu and had learned from a book. This impressed them even more.
Here's a vat of fresh tofu:

Mmmmm...so creamy and delicious. This is my creamy and delicious face.

After this nutritious breakfast (the original breakfast of champions - ask any yokozuna), we figured we had enough time to ride out to the Kinkakuji Temple, or Golden Pavilion. We didn't and figured that out about 20 really hot minutes into the ride. You may not know this, but it is really really really hot here in Kyoto, with basically 100% humidity. This means that it's very hot, and it rains for minutes at a time - sometimes very hard, sometimes just sprinkle, but all day, on and off. Very different. The moisture in the air is very much so.

So we rode back to the Imperial Palace, parked the bikes and took a cab to the Golden Pavilion. It's a famous place, not only for being gold (plated - cheap bastards), but because in 1950 it was burned to the ground by a young apprentice monk, for reasons that are unclear. He may have been overcome with some emotion. Or he tossed a cigarette butt in the wrong place. Which is why the warnings on cigarette packs here speak about how they are hazardous to your temple. They rebuilt the temple, and you would never know that just 50-some years ago, the place was an insurance-monks dream.
Here's the temple - it reflects too:

I forgot to say this earlier, but we had a plan to meet up with a friend of a college friend of Miriams, a tour guide named Michiko. She was coming with us to the Imperial Palace, and on to Nijo Palace afterwards.
We left the Golden Pavilion, and realized we had plum run out of cash. I say "plum", because the Japanese use plum paste in various ways, mostly pickled. They call it umeboshi. We had some travelers cheques and managed to find a bank to cash them. They took their time approving us, and we just made it to the Imperial Palace on time.
We met up with Michiko and joined the tour, which was pretty neat.
Here's us with Michiko:
And here's Miriam - I'm a big fan.

The palace is full of very cool buildings, none of which we could go in, but we heard about how they look on the inside. I'm sure you can just picture it.

In fact, picture this:
And this:
And here's a garden from inside:
And here we are, keeping cool:

Overall one of the best palaces I've been to.

After the Imperial Palace, we headed over to the Nijo Palace with Michiko, where she gave us a great tour of the place. By the way, the Japanese should really watch more Disney movies before they start calling these places "palaces". I mean, come on.
They did have these very cool floors called "nightingales" that were designed to make little chirping sounds as you walked on them so that the Shogun would be warned when someone was coming.
Here's what they look like from the bottom:

The shogun, by the way, was the military leader of Japan, under the Emperor. At some point, he took total control and made the emperor the titular head. The Meiji Restoration changed all that.

Here's a nice garden from the Nijo Palace, and another building from in the palace:





After the Nijo Palace, we went back to our hotel and passed out for a while. We wanted to go check out this hour-long performance of different Japanese artforms, such as flower arranging, Geisha-dancing, comedy, and English-translating. The show turned out to be pretty weak, but we both convinced ourselves it was "worth seeing." After the show, we took part in a tea ceremony, which was actually pretty cool. I can't imagine having to go through that every time I wanted tea, however. I think the Japanese don't want to either, which is why it's now just a ceremony.

A little dinner, a few drinks and off to bed.

So that was that. Another nice day in Japanland.


Oh yeah, this was a shrine we passed in the street. There were statues of pigs all over the place.