A couple for me. The first was about an hour and a half after we stepped off the plane at Narita. We'd been awake for about 26 hours - the flight doesn't leave the UK until the afternoon, then it landed at NRT about 09:00 local time after 12 hours in the air. Then another hour or so getting through immigration, sitting on the train into Tokyo station, and off to a taxi rank to thrust the address of our hotel at a bewildered taxi driver.
It was the tail end of monsoon season. We were soaked through in under sixty seconds. And it was
brilliant. And after we'd dropped our luggage at the hotel, we went out and wandered, and found a little diner on a back street, and it was raining even harder, and we were just so glad to find food and a place to sit, and the waitress was so lovely and helpful. In spite of our extreme weariness and being drenched, that was when we just fell in love with the place.
The second was walking around the gardens at ginkakuji. Following the route signs, as you do. We reach this one:
Coming the other way up the path is a little old Japanese gentleman, his hands behind his back, his head bowed. He pauses in front of this sign and looks at it, then he says, in English: "Hmm... One way."
He thinks about this, then continues onward, still moving against the flow of foot traffic.
Genius. Utter genius
