Nicely, this cheap hotel in Okayama has wireless internet. Actually, the wireless router is unsecured and not set up, so if I was an ass, I’d go in and give it some screwed-up password. Today was a trip out to Onomichi and Kurashiki to see old stuff after yesterday’s trapsing around Naoshima looking at some great collections of art both classic and contemporary, and getting that mental limit of what constitutes art and what doesn’t stretched and massaged. Contrary to the feel of the town put forth in fiction like Kamichu!, Onomichi feels like a place that has forgotten its Kami like an inconvenient burden. Walking its steep, meandering hillside paths, one should be greeted on every turn by the town’s cats, at least according to the tourist blurb. All I saw were three or four sickly cats and one “lost cat” poster.
On the trip up the ropeway, this fashionable youth in a limited white tee-shirt entered the already packed car with some “MultiCam” pants. I have that in quotes because they probably weren’t the genuine article. The colors were all a little bit off, and it was some faded poly-cotton tweed and not a colorfast nylon-cotton ripstop. I don’t know (or care, really) if he noticed my Tactical Tailor Active Shooter Bag in the genuine fabric.
After a kamameshi lunch, it was back toward Okayama with a stop in Kurashiki to wander the somewhat commercialized old quarter of town. It’s somewhat like the old shopping arcades along the paths to Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera, but level. Although I had some reservations about this place, I actually had a better time there than in Onomichi. Back in Okayama, I found an awesome diner in the East-side shopping arcade with some awesome Thai red curry and juicy karaage. More on that later. It’s time to drink my Kirin Aki-aji and go to sleep.
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