{"id":9045,"date":"2017-02-17T14:24:39","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T19:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=9045"},"modified":"2017-02-17T14:25:44","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T19:25:44","slug":"kyoto-night-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=9045","title":{"rendered":"Kyoto Night Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Part of the fun and adventure of being in Japan is getting lost, both spatially and temporally. With kanji characters and a foreign language best described as the Star Wars-ian Force (**) mysticism, I&#8217;m truly a stranger in a strange land.<\/p>\n<p><em>(**) This is because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moviequotedb.com\/movies\/star-wars-episode-vi-return-of-the-jedi\/quote_29990.htm\">my brother has a power I don&#8217;t understand and could never have<\/a>.\u00a0 He speaks Japaneses&#8230; although, he&#8217;d say he can read decently classical Japanese and downplays his fluency. But I&#8217;ll take a flowery formality of a bygone age with supposed minimal comprehension over my deer in the headlights, ugly Americanism any day. Miss ya, bro.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As part of getting lost in translation (Good Gravy, Sofia Coppola! I&#8217;m gonna keep making that reference!), the jetlag time zone skip means you&#8217;re never really in time, you&#8217;re just awake or in a temporary unconscious state. I think maybe I slept four hours last night. It&#8217;s now almost 4 AM and I&#8217;ve been up for a couple of hours. I showered early before they closed the public baths\/shower facilities the capsule hotel runs for cleaning. And though exhausted, it feels like, I don&#8217;t know, late morning\/early afternoon to me? My usual practice of being up with the sun and down with the moon is failing me and maybe that&#8217;s part and parcel of the weird, odd, &#8220;foreign&#8221; adventure I find myself in.<\/p>\n<p>On top of that, there&#8217;s that weird &#8220;lost in the weeds&#8221; of navigation. I never have had a good sense of direction &#8212; I feel like in some ways I was destined to be rechristened &#8220;Wrong Way Kevin&#8221; for invariably going the 180 degrees in the exact wrong direction in trying to get somewhere. You&#8217;d think then I should just always do the opposite of what my mind and body tell me is the direction but if I know that I should be doing the opposite doesn&#8217;t my internal compass correct and by knowingly doing the opposite I would in actuality wind up going the wrong way anyway. Ah, the irrational rationality of the bugs in the machine that is humanity.<\/p>\n<p>I very often have led us down a dead end or miscalculated on transport options to get from point A to point B (what, you DIDN&#8217;T want to see Point Q en route to B? Nonsense!). It can be frustrating amongst the fun, particularly for a guy like me who&#8217;s such a control freak, anal retentive planner. So while there&#8217;s great success and satisfaction in getting UN-lost, there&#8217;s a lot of hair pulling and hand-wringing in the lostness.<\/p>\n<p>I know my Mom is one of the devoted dozen readers of this blog and thus this&#8217;ll make for an awkward breakfast conversation later today, but I feel like I&#8217;m letting her down when we get lost and I&#8217;m not sure it&#8217;s &#8220;fun&#8221; all the time. I&#8217;m actually not a great travel companion though Mom keeps putting up with me and for that I appreciate it. Still, I&#8217;m feeling a little guilty.<\/p>\n<p>The subway eventually stops running here in Japan.\u00a0 And when that time comes, those folks out and about be it at a Karoake Bar or visiting friends or whatever it is people do after 2 AM in any parts of the world, they have a few options.\u00a0 They could try and grab a capsule cabin in a hotel or the cheaper option is to just wander into a 24-hour lobby and, well, pass the time&#8230; as these two girls have opted this late evening\/early morning.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-9164\" src=\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-830x1107.jpg 830w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-230x307.jpg 230w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/IMG_1972-350x467.jpg 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So while I&#8217;ve gotten Mom lost and put her up in a capsule bunk, at least I got her a place to sleep and I didn&#8217;t make her slump over in a Samurai Lounge for the night&#8230; albeit she can&#8217;t sleep either and we&#8217;re both sitting here passing the time until breakfast.\u00a0 So maybe I AM making her while away the hours slumped in a partially dead space that seems to favor &#8220;The Girl From Ipanema&#8221; as a soundtrack to our lives.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a weird, odd trip&#8230; but forget it, Kevin&#8230; it&#8217;s Japan-town.\u00a0 Or more accurately it&#8217;s Japan.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of the fun and adventure of being in Japan is getting lost, both spatially and temporally. With kanji characters and a foreign language best described as the Star Wars-ian Force (**) mysticism, I&#8217;m truly a stranger in a strange land. (**) This is because my brother has a power I don&#8217;t understand and could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}