anoisette

The last few days have involved going all over Kansai. Today we went to the Kyoto Studio Park Toei Uzumasa Eigamura. We dressed in yukatas (picked up cheaply and on impulse yesterday at a Uniqlo near Kyoto Station) and got half-off admission. The park was pretty neat, it was fun to poke our heads into all kinds of traditional style Japanese buildings. Unfortunately they weren’t filming anything today so we didn’t get to see any of that. But it was still fun to check out the park and I’m glad we went. Then we headed over the to Nishijin Textile Center and caught the Kimono Show and admired beautiful textiles.

After that we headed over to Gion because my friend wanted to check it out. While walking around the narrow streets, it was uncanny how many tourists kept snapping pictures of us in our yukatas.  My friend kept wanting to tell everyone “We’re not real!” as in, we’re just just tourists too! Throughout the day we also noticed lots of old Japanese ladies would look us up and down and smile at us. Maybe they were happy to see young folk in yukatas? Anyway, it was a pretty interesting experience to see how people will react differently to you just based on what you are wearing. And of course it was fun to get to wear a yukata for a day. I had no idea how to put it on, or tie the obi. But I followed the picture directions included with mine, as well as these useful videos and we were on our way.