kalin

After 13 long days in a hotel in Osaka, we’ve finally moved into the apartment in Kyoto. The hotel was nice, but it gets dull after a long stay. It’s good to have a personal space again. And a desk. And a chair. Except the chair sucks. The apartment was built last november, so the engineering is quite modern.

The little details like the locks and light switches and such makes it nice to live in. The design of basic elements seems robust and well thought out.

The apartment is basically a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, toilet and a single room which functions as bedroom, living room, office, and anything other desirable room. It’s nice to have a more permanent space to get set up in. The air conditioning is quite good, and the place can get even too warm with it on, despite how cold it is outside.

Kyoto seems a little colder than Osaka so far. The wind just has more of a chill to it. I was expecting it to snow a little more, but there has only been a few periods of very brief snowfall since we got here, which melted immediately. It’s said that Kyoto has fairly extreme seasons compared to other places in Japan. Colder winter, hotter summer. The seasons seem fairly strongly defined — a nice change from Australia’s four seasons of Summer, Summer, Summer, and Slightly-less-summer.

This place seems a bit less dense than Osaka so far. The buildings around here just seem alot lower, mostly 2-4 floors high; around our hotel in Osaka pretty much everything was 10 floors high or above. The actual density of buildings is still quite high, lots of buildings here are so close that you couldn’t even fit a person through the gap between them. There are alot of small shrines and temples around this area, and a few more trees and parks. Osaka was mostly just non-stop city in every direction.

Our apartment manager sold us two bicycles here for 3000円 (30AUD) each, and they’re basically the standard Japanese Bicicyle that pretty much everyone uses. The baskets on them are just awesome, and saves me carrying a bag everywhere to buy food and stuff. Despite being a cheap and basic bicycle, they are actually very comfortable and easy to ride; they can pick up some pretty good speed without much effort. However, usually it’s just a casual pace riding around, since there are so many people that you are pretty much always maneuvering around someone. Usually you get 5-6 people on bikes in a column just cruising down the side of a street. I’m continually suprised at the age of the people I see riding bikes.. some very old people who look like they would have trouble walking, are just zooming along with a basket full of groceries. The Japanese diet must really have an effect as the years go by.

Getting back to cooking here is a little tricky under the constraints. It’s difficult to find foods that I even recognize, so planning a meal is problematic. I attempted to get a savoury-barbecue sort of flavour for a stew tonight, but ended up with some Citrus-Soy sort of thing. Lots of the vegetables I’m used to are either expensive or just not around. Oh for a big bag of green beans!

Most of the meals in the future are probably going to be soups and stews, since the kitchen only has a single hot-plate. Ack. I would like to avoid buying things like rice cookers and extra kitchenware and dishes, since it will just be akward when I move next; but this means having to change around alot of lifestyle — hopefully for the best. When you have alot of space, you tend to expand to fill it, without really gaining that much. It’s good to really live with a very minimal set of stuff. Less waste, simpler things. Everything is easier this way.

The density of the population here is obviously a little lower than Osaka. There seems to be more people driving cars than Osaka, though still the majority of people are on bicycles. I always considered high population density to be a problem, but now I’m starting to consider it a boon. Under these restrictions, there is less waste of resources and the general features are moved to central areas. In more spacious areas, everyone has a yard and a barbecue, and a entertainment area, and a drinking area and pools and so forth, but when you increase the population density these things seem to just move to central locations. Lots of people here drink and eat out, and it is cheap and sociable. There are large parks for everyone, instead of everyone having a yard. It’s sort of just like public transport compared to cars.

Alot of the social culture seems to be centered around eating and drinking out in a social atmosphere, and the two are usually done together. At least as far as I understand. That’s something I’ll have to go check out more of before I can write alot about it!

じゃーまた！

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under kyoto, ruminations, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.