night dreams from orient

I am unable to find an internet place in the faraway countries I am visiting. Therefore, the connection is dropping out, and I can't read what you people eventually answered to my spy story suggestion... Yesterday's post was kind of broken by the difficulties of typing with the japanese keyboard (NOTE: I clean'd it up before re-posting :) Moreover on a ugly windows pc which has some settings different from apple. In fact, there was one piece missing, where the yose-nabe meal was described. Not much to remember, since it was ok but not as exciting as the kaiseki. It was basically a kind of fondue bourguignonne, with everything inside the boiling pot. However, the cooking fluid is a broth and, here is the smart idea of the japanese, they serve you another cuplet where to pour the same broth cold: so you can dip the stuff you pick from the boiling pot and cool it to eat without danger :)

Tonight I am in Nara, in another wonderful hostel. This ryokan is even more fantastic than the other, if you fancy to take a look at a map of Nara and try to see where the Kankaso ryokan is located. Right in the middle of the Nara park, among the most magnificent temples of the whole Japan! Deers all around, they are completely tamed and familiar with the humans, to the point that one came to me and tried to bite my Lonely planet guide, stamping his teeths in the paper...

The hotel has a wonderful japanese garden that I can see from my window, I am a being treated regally. For dinner another kaiseki, and at this point I am so expert that I can even judge. The quality is still at the top, but there are a little few details here and there that make the one in Kyoto superior, as far as the care and attention to the serving is concerned. And after such a dinner, I coud allow me another walk after night, to take some photos of the Todai-ji temple illuminated and other stuff around (they do such night illumination in summer, and the july 31 there is a famous peace fest celebration, the Nara To-an (if I remember well the spelling), for which all the hills of the large park, several km by each side, are illuminated with a dense network of tealights placed on the grass (very romantic, as the whole atmosphere around Nara is, provided only some deer does not try to eat the tealight).

The day of visit was long and hot, one wonderful temple after the other but not as terrible as yesterday in Kyoto, after I adopted the local customs to beat the sun: walk aorund with a towel to dry your sweat and an open umbrella over your head. I was the local hit, sporting my Evening Standard blue cover!! It also helped the fact that a good part of the path developed under a beautiful woodland, with ancient trees as tall as 15 or 20 metres.

I am now sitting in the ryokan, on the tatami and dressed in the light cotton yukata, looking a faraway moon, the smell of a thousand flowers in the warm summer night...