Lucky 7s

July 7th found Jade and me in Kyoto for Tanabata. Tanabata is a star festival celebrating the annual meeting of Vega and Altair. Most cities celebrate it on the 7th day of the lunar calendar, but Kyoto obliged me by sticking to July 7th.

As we walked up to Kiyomizudera, we saw tons of classy B&W posters featuring Kiyomizudera with the print "The New Wonders." Not only was it 7/7, it was 7/7/07! Obviously extraordinarily lucky, it was also the day the New Seven Wonders would be announced. And we were at one of the locations! How cool! So we each snagged a free poster and continued up to write wishes to tie on bamboo.



In addition to confessing our wishes, we saw another rite; write a trouble on tissue-thin paper, then put the paper into a deep bowl of water. When your paper dissolves, so will your troubles! There was a woman ahead of us, so we waited for about 5 minutes before noticing she had a stack nearly 2 inches thick! So we slipped around her and slipped our trouble-laden papers into the water.

After lunch, Jade and I went to Heian Shrine [seen in Lost in Translation]-- it was fantastic! If we'd known just how cool it was, we would've planned more time, but as it was, we did a whirlwind tour of the garden, walked across the stepping stones, and then left.

We tried to find the 6 floor handicraft center, but were treated to a multitude of wrong directions [more on this later]. Frustrated, we gave up and headed to the bamboo forest. As is often the case, the beautiful pics in the brochures had been heavily cropped-- the forest was still interesting, but not as deep or as thick as we'd expected.

Having seen the sights and bought the omiyage, we headed home.