Kyoto - A break

22-7-6

Truth be told at this stage of our trip, we are both feeling slightly buggered, so we decided to take a break from the usual `sightseeing.` We caught the subway to Shijo a suburb in Kyoto, conveniently located 2 stops away from where we are staying.

Main street in Shijo is the usual shopping area you`ll come across anywhere, but off main stretch is an arcade/alley-way area called Takashima Dori with a variety of shops including souvenier, food, cool clothing stores, a toy-store (that we visited 3 times) and a movie complex!
The purpose of our trip to Shijo today was to go to a movie, and not just any movie, but ` Pirates of the Caribbean 2` (Yaaah Johnny!! - ps. that`s not why Tere wanted to go). Movix Complex was the name of the theatre franchise & fortunately for us they screen English language movies.

Purchased the tickets at approx 3 pm for the 7.20 pm session as all earlier sessions sold out. Today was the opening day for Pirates 2.
The tickets cost 1800 Yen each - fairly pricey! is approx. $25 NZ - and I thought movie tickets in NZ were expensive!!

Decided to fill in time by wandering around and browsing the various stores. Found HMV music store & headed for fashion mag section, stocked up on three (very hard to find English books/mags). Came across cool independent music store with bootleg DVD`s of concerts - got David Bowie & NIN. Some cool stuff there.
Found one of the supercool internet cafes & sat in there for about 1 hour to kill time, relax & surf net.
Finally time for movie, theatre pretty standard - equiv to Reading Theatre. Movie was enjoyable, light entertainment. Not that I`m at all biased...but Johnny Depp was fabulous as usual & made up for the dribble that was Orlando Bloom & Keira Knightly. The scenes including these two pouting baffoons were excruitiating....even bobo the labotimized monkey could do a better job at reading a script & acting.
Anyway was great to sit down in dark theatre & do nothing for 2.5 hours, so nice to do nothing.
The screening we saw had Japanese subtitles & excuse my ignorance but I`m not sure if it`s a cultural thing but there were a couple of humorous scenes in the movie & Tere, I and the other foreigners in the theatre laughed out loud accordingly. But not a peep from the Japanese punters - infact when Tere & I were chortiling, we saw some of the silhouetted faces of the locals staring at us. Either it`s cultural that you don`t laugh out loud or t maybe their sense of humor is different...?

By the time the movie finished it was 10pm & our hostel has a 11 pm curfew - damn their curfews!! So we booted it to the subway, jumped on train & made it back to our stop at
10.25 pm.
Another oddity at our hotel is that you are only allowed to use the bath/shower facilities between the hours of 5pm-12 midnight, so get home just before 11pm, change into our
kimono-esque bath-robes and head down to the `basement` for a shower, only to be confronted by a gang of noisy American school kids & their pakeha Japanese teacher (they are from Oregan & this is their school trip, WOW) playing ping-pong on the ping-pong table located conveniently outside the showers.
Also one of the young girls informs me there is a huge cockroach inside the women`s shower - so that does it for me, I make do with the basin in our room, amazing how you can manage.

NB - our shower facilities are traditional Japanese `communal` bath/shower areas. One area of girls & one for boys. Just keep in mind next time you decide to visit Japan, make sure you feel totally comfortable with the other guests.... with or without clothes.
Somehow that just doesn`t work for me - luckily I have a swimsuit.

Head back up to our room, we watch an episode of I.T Crowd on my i-pod and go to sleep.