Ancient Lands
After the birthday celebrations and long goodbyes, I started my journey to Kyoto on the bullet train. Those trains are so freaking cool. Although I'm no train nerd, I'm stoked about this train. It's an engineering marvel that I've been looking forward to sitting on since elementary school. The train lived up to the hype.
I got to the terminal half an hour early and had time to kill. Like most places in Japan, I got a freshly brewed cup of drip coffee. This was super fun because this one came from a machine. I choose which beans I'd like my coffee to have, how strong I'd like it to be, and the size of the cup. The machine got me pretty hyped for the engineering of Japan.
On the train, the seats are comfortable, and turn around if you want to make the two-by-two configuration into a 4 person set facing each other. There was extra storage space and even reserved lockable compartments for large luggage. One can barely feel the train move, accelerate, and slow down. Something you should know about me is that whenever I'm in a cool place, I have to check out the bathroom and see if it lives up to the rest of the atmosphere. Don't ask me how this started, but it's become an essential custom for me. I walk into the bathroom and am immediately in awe. It's so clean and comfortable that I sat down for the full experience. While sitting down, I think of my cousin's offhanded comment about a bathroom being so clean that he would have been happy living there.
The businessman beside me was not as amused by the train as I was, but I didn't let that dampen my spirits.
After getting off at Kyto station, I take the local bus to my hostel. While riding the high of being on the most incredible train ever, I get to Millenial Kyoto. This is a capsule hostel where you get a double bed pod with storage under the bed. The bed has a remote platform that becomes a couch to hang out during the day; the common space was full-featured, there was free beer for an hour every day, there was a coworking space with monitors, and, as most places in Japan, the bathrooms/showers were immaculate.
My days in Kyoto were long and adventurous. Kyoto was once the capital of many Japanese emperors. With that, it has a vast network of shrines, villages, and historic spaces that showcase the dominant history of Japan. Every shrine I visit is another amazingly preserved relic that integrates into nature rather than modifies it. Natural water movement crisscrosses the walkways, trees that shade public places, benches in the best lookouts, and perfectly preserved cobblestone and wood features that rival Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House. Kyoto was the Japanese experience I was looking forward to, and I'm glad my friends pushed me to visit it.
With my 6 months in India, I couldn't help but compare the countries. I read somewhere that India's land has been ravaged, plundered, and looted countless times since 1101 AD. The more I got to experience Japan, the more I understood what India must have once looked like and became angry that it was never able to preserve the historic features the land once held. You can visit forts from 100 AD, but you don't see preserved elements of ancient Indian societies with wealth, knowledge, and cultural heritage. It's a bittersweet reality that I am starting to understand and be proud of. I still don't get along with many big-city Indian, but I understand why the culture is so different. Looking back, I find it crazy that traveling outside India taught me more about my culture than I had learned in 6 months of living there.