Goma

Toasted crushed sesame seeds ready to be added to fresh udon at O-men.

Fushimi Inari

An endless flow of red torii gates at Fushimi Inari shrine.

This is the head shrine for about 40,000 others across Japan. If you see little fox statues just past the entrance torii, you know it's an inari shrine.

At Fushimi, just south of Kyoto, you can follow the gate-path all the way to the top of the mountain, with views out over the city and toward Osaka. I contemplated them with a kinako (toasted-soybean flour) ice cream in my hand.

In Memoriam

Hoy pienso en ti, querida tia.

Honorable noodles

A picture of my delicious delicious lunch at O-men today. I might have to go back tomorrow...

J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

J'aimerais bien savoir à quoi sers-je?
J'aimerais voir une forêt vierge
J’voudrais comprendre pourquoi Tout?
Et ne plus rien vouloir du tout

If there's anything more appropriate to kick off a transcontinental adventure than a Québec francophone klezmer song about the perils and joys of globalisation, I don't know what it is.

In any case, that's what I'm doing. In a few days I'm setting out for a six month tour of Japan and South-East Asia, and while I'm currently in that stage of preparation known as "denial" where everything feels quite unreal, it probably really is going to happen.

My plan is to blog about the trip here, and since my Brooklyn blog languished fairly quickly, I've decided to give myself a bit of a focus. Another thing I did to help prepare for my trip (=procrastinate) was to make a travel playlist - about five hours of music that in my mind at least was connected with travelling. I'm still hoping to find a way to put it all up here for you to listen to, but that may not happen.

So my focus is to use the songs to structure posts about travelling itself, as well as the details of the places I visit. This is a risky project that might degenerate rapidly into pretentious rambling, in which case I will cut it off.

Today's song, "Kyoto" by Polémil Bazar, is my response to everyone who asked me, "Why Asia?" or even better, "Why travel at all?" It's not so much that I have a good answer, more that I have a worse answer to the question "Why not?" So in this case I think I'll let the song answer for me.

The photos in this post are all from my trip to Kyoto in summer 2008. I hope to be posting new ones soon...

Oh and yes, the little wombat will be coming with me. She wants to see South-East Asia too!

The full lyrics to the song are here:
http://www.hugofleury.com/polo/texte_chants_mines.htm#KYOTO

J'aimerais voler, quitter ma tête
Aller semer partout la fête
Visiter Bagdad à vélo
J'voudrais respirer l'air de Kyoto

--Polémil Bazar