The fairy Geisha.

Kizu-cho, Kyoto

Today Rob woke us up at the incredible hour of 9.00 AM so we could go for a tour to Kyoto again, anyhow we took the train around 11.00 and we got there in like 40 minutes, now the first part of our trip was quite amazing, it turns out that Kyoto station is also something similar to a plaza, its got all these stores and restaurants, it is a big place, and of course the first thing we visited was a computer store where you could virtually buy anything, of course we spent like an hour there wondering around and looking for all these gadgets, also once again Japan proved to be a great source for porn.

Once done that we took a bus to Nijo-jo which is a temple that is surrounded by water and that it was once the house of the biggest shogun in the area, it was really interesting, specially the floor which made some noises every time you walked, actually the mechanism has some nails below the wood (I know this because I saw it in the discovery channel), again the gardens were beautiful and the temple it self or castle rather was also worth seeing.

Then we walked to what we thought was the Geishas district and walked and walked around some covered alleys and had some lunch in a nice local place, needless to say we didn't see any Geishas, but we did have fun wondering around the area, also I got some pretty pictures of one of the shirnes in the area.

After all this was done we were pretty tired and we had no idea what to do so we just walked until we bumped into this bridge that you could walk down and sit by the river, so we did. I have to tell you that I was the one in charge of taking photographs in the team and Rob and Justin were my guides, but later on after reading the book a little while we found the real Geisha district which was just blocks away from where we were and so we went there and we started to look for Geishas or Maikos which are apprentices of Geishas, now I need to give you some background about this before my story continues.

Geishas as far as my understanding could go were some highly educated women who are hired by wealthy men just for company and a nice talk, all of this is true, however there is another hidden secret that we foreigners don’t know about them and is the idea on how Geishas are seen by we mortal people, students who barely have money to eat and never enough to pay one of this ... Delicacies, well they are mysterious beings, rarely seen in public and that disappear right in front of your eyes and merge into the crowd not to be seen again. All the stories you hear about Geishas are of people that saw them by the corner of their eyes or that saw them for a few seconds in the street until they disappeared by some kind of magic that at least for me is fascinating.

My advisor, Rob actually has a good story that I will tell you now, and is that he once looked up in one of these alleys and there it was this Geisha in a balcony, as he remembers all sounds disappeared for a couple of seconds, he looked at her in the eyes and nodded in a sign of respect, she nodded back and gave two steps back and again disappeared for ever. I loved his story, and so we tried to see something, we walked to the district and in the middle of the alley we waited, a few seconds later we saw one that we assumed was a Maiko, we just saw her back while she was walking away from us and a few seconds later she was gone. Of course we got excited and we waited for a little while more, there was this other Geisha that Rob and Justin saw but I missed, and so there were this three Gaijins in the middle of the street waiting for this fairies to come out and greet us with their sole presence, or if we deserve it, who knows? Maybe even a smile.

After a while of waiting we decided to leave the alley and keep our walk, of course those 10 or 15 minutes that we spent waiting for the Geishas were emotional and fantastic, if it was for me I would go back every night with the hope of seeing one of those white pretty faces just one time. I felt like a kid in the wood waiting for fire flies to come out and say hello at dawn.

We walked back to the station stopping by one of the many shrines in district. Let me tell you that shrines are like temples, but I’m not sure if they are for another religion or what, anyhow some people was there praying and paying respects. I was tempted to go and ring the big bell they have and pray a little while, but I felt that would have been disrespectful, so we just walked back to the station.

After walking for so many hours for such a long distance my feet are killing me, but hey when you're convinced that you're a traveler you convert pain into motion and just keep walking.