Day 11

Today we were planing on going to get a Gesiha makeover, walk around the Gion area and potentially knock out a temple. We didn't get up until after 9 am because we had black out curtains and slept like the dead. We had to get to the Gion area prior to 1 pm, so we just headed there from Osaka. We send our luggage ahead to our hotel in Kyoto the next night so we didn't have to deal with luggage (although we both had our backpacks) and grabbed the train. We got on the train toward Kyoto and it looked like everything was good. But Google maps kept showing that the time to our destination was increasing. Turns out that this line split and we were on another line. We jumped off the train and got on the one going back the other way (although we were in a rural area so we had to wait for the train). We emailed the place to tell them that we weren't going to make it on time at this point and they pushed us back to 3:30.

We finally made it to Gion 3 hours after we started out that morning and walked around. We wanted to make sure that we found the place first so that we showed up on time! Gion was packed. We figured that it was typical for a Sunday, just like Harajuku had been packed the week before. Little did we know that the rest of the week was going to be packed because of holidays. Japan has two national holidays - Monday is Respect for the Aged Day and Wednesday is the Autumn Equinox. Apparently, whenever these days fall on a Monday/Wednesday, they add in a holiday on Tuesday called Bridge Day. This way everyone gets a 5-day weekend. This also means that everyone travels to Kyoto, which is essentially one large tourist trap.

The streets here were narrow, but the cars were huge. People would be barreling down the street in a land cruiser with pedestrians on both sides of basically European looking streets. Everywhere else in Japan seemed to have tiny cars - just not here! The directions got a bit mixed up and we climbed up these really long stairs and came across a cheerleading competition. The odd part was that the cheerleaders on stage ranged from maybe 3-5 years old to high school level - all on stage at the same time, doing the same moves.

There were many vendors set up as well and we bought fried steak (delicious) and a mango drink (also really delicious). There was also a temple up here, but not the Geisha place. We got directions and headed out again and this time found the place about 30 minutes early. We were going to drop off our backpacks but decided to just stay there since we were hot and my feet were killing me. I was also worried about the hotel for the night because we were going to get a love hotel and had decided we didn't feel like going back to Osaka, so we needed to find an area in Kyoto.

They came to grab me to start makeup, and left Dave there since he was just going to wear a costume. I put on an undergarment and went to the makeup room where several other girls were getting made up. Again, we were the only non-Asians there, but we were used to it. The girl doing the make up spoke limited English, but she did a great job. She put a wig on my head and then took some of my real hair to tie into the wig. Not sure why they do this. At first it looked so funny with the blonde streaks, but then they spray painted it black. It was funny because they spray-painted everyone's hair, even the Asians with black hair.

Next came a different girl to help get me dressed. She was super tiny (everyone was so tiny) and I probably was 3 inches taller at least. She had on funky color contacts, a Star of David choker (The Star of David and swastika were apparently Buddhist symbols), and one of those huge ear lobe spacer things. Not something you'd normally see in Kyoto. There is a semi corset as part of the outfit, but when they squeeze it to make you smaller, it wasn't trying to emphasize your waist or have more of an hour glass figure, but to squish down the boobs. At least that's what happened with me! They put on layer after layer after layer and it took forever. In the meantime, they had brought up Dave and put him in a male kimono in about 5 minutes or less.

They then added all kinds of hair accessories and took us into the photo studio. In the geisha makeup, you have to do the closed mouth smile. I also wondered why they did this, but figured out really soon. Because your skin is bright white, your teeth look awful. I thought at first I had lipstick or something on my teeth, but nope - the contrast was just that bad. Anyhow, they knocked out the photos and then let us have 10 minutes free time on the street to take a few photos. The people walking by found us amusing since Dave doesn't exactly look the part of a Samurai. Then we headed back and I had to get rid of my makeup. The locker room had sinks with hoses on them so I had to wash my hair in the sink about 5-6 times to get the dye out and get all the rest off. Then we looked at our photos. We thought that you'd get to pick which ones you wanted, but they had already printed them up. They also gave us a CD with them, but since my computer didn't have a CD player, we had to wait to get home to look at them. It was already about 6 pm now so we asked them where to find a love hotel. They drew us a map to the area and we set off to find it. We were concerned that it would be hard to find a room because of all the people.

On the way to the area they mapped out, Dave found a grouping of about 5 hotels. For a love hotel, you walk into the lobby and see a screen of rooms available (they're lit up), press the button and get a key and then go to the room. The first hotel had nothing available. The second one we didn't even get up to the sign before a guy came out and told us nothing was available. The third one had 3 lights lit up and as we were deciding on which one, the lights all turned off. We started to figure that it was because they saw us and we waited outside for 2 minutes, went back in and the lights were back on. Dave pressed one of the buttons and nothing happened and there was a guy behind the counter who looked at Dave and then left. We went into a 4th one and the lady started yelling at us "no, no, no, we couldn't stay there". She tried pointing to another place that we had previously been directed to where apparently they take our kind, but that one was booked. We had never seen such blatant racism - we thought it was just that we didn't speak the language - but we got shut down before we spoke, so it was a white thing.

We were pissed to say the least, and also worried about finding a place. We walked over to the area that the girl had originally pointed out and found another hotel. This one had a lot of lights lit up and they didn't turn off when we walked in. We knew that once in you couldn't leave, so we wanted to grab food first. We found a place down the street with an English menu and ducked in. Service was terrible, and there was a 100 Yen fee for just sitting there (not sure that there was a fee on the Japanese menu). They forgot our soup here as well -  no soup for us, and after the slowest service we finally got some food. The only cool part about this restaurant is that they had a tank behind the bar with seaweed in it, so you get the freshest seaweed possible. Anyhow, we left this place and went back to the hotel to make sure we had a room.

We pressed the button on one of the room and a key popped out and the sign lit up pointing toward the elevator. When we got to our floor, the light above our room was blinking. Guess they try to idiot proof it. We got into the room and were relieved that we weren't going to be sleeping on the street that night! The room was pretty large, but reeked of smoke since all love hotels allow smoking. There was a large bathroom with a tub with jets and lots of amenities such as makeup remover, face cleanser, etc. Apart from additional amenities, there wasn't much to be said for the love hotel. It was reasonable priced, but you could probably find a legit, smoke-free place for just as much on your own. Since love hotels aren't kitschy anymore, I really don't think there's any reason to stay at one anymore. They also had pixelated porn on the TV (in Japan they blur out everything), and that was about it. At about 11 pm the phone rang and the guy started saying something in Japanese. Dave spoke back in English and he said, one second and hung up. I was so tired I wanted to go to bed but was worried that we were going to get booted from the room. About 30 minutes later, there's a knock at the door. The guy wants money now, so Dave paid him and we went to bed. Glad that they accepted our kind here, but was really disappointed to see how rampant the racism was in this area as we experienced it in several other instances as well.