Hello and welcome to Week 43! Yes, it’s me again, bringing you the latest from the far north (north from Australia, that is). This time I have managed to find some free time at the computer earlier, so that it is only one week since my last posting!!

After the flurry of bureaucratic encounters and putting together our internet presence, it has been quite a calm week – and the weather has been lovely. The extreme humidity has definitely passed now, and even though most of the days have been in the low 30s it is quite comfortable to go outside. It is also really nice to have the windows open most of the time. The kids have also been much more lively – when they’re awake…

This week we continued trying to increase the exposure of our minshuku, through finding as many relevant websites as possible to list ourselves on and we have created a business card to hand around here. We plan to visit all the vegan and vegetarian restaurants we can and hand out these cards. Also, it is just the done thing here to swap business cards.

So, to The Frame – until all the doors are on, I can’t really call it The House. We decided to visit on Sunday, with the hope that no workers would be there so that we could go inside and climb up to the second floor (Australian translation: first floor). Until the stairs are built, the only access to the floor is via a ladder and I don’t think the workers would take it too well if we just decided to take over their ladder and get in their way (though, I’d guarantee they wouldn’t say so).

The first thing we noticed is that the front entrance area has had the final concrete pour to bring the level up to the floor level. This is the area just inside the front door where you enter with shoes and then take them off to walk around inside the rest of the house. We also have an area like that at the entrance to our area from the outside. In our area, there is what appears to be space for a shoe cupboard just inside the door, too.

The next thing we noticed is that most of the windows and glass doors have now been installed – they are all double glazed, which I was very pleased to see. I had thought that this would be beyond our budget, so I really was thrilled when I saw them. Heating and cooling such a large space will be quite expensive, so any extra insulation is a very good thing. We also noted that the walls were having insulation put in them – another good thing.

I must say, it is feeling more and more like a home every time we go there. I look forward to the day our goods and chattels arrive and we can start decorating our space. Our part of the house, which is about 25% of the total area isn’t that huge, but I imagine that it will feel like a bigger space because of the rest of the house being so big.

(cool drinks fridges and payment box!)

After exploring the first floor (Australian translation: ground floor), Craig got the ladder and we climbed up to the second floor. I should note here that we had to climb over a fence to actually get into the building site, as it was closed up for the weekend. The climb into the site was a little difficult for a person who is vertically challenged (me), and the climb up the ladder was somewhat more precarious. The ladder was a foldout ladder and bounced a bit as I climbed it…

The upstairs area is where the guestrooms are located – all five of them. It was amazing walking around in them and getting a feel for how they will be. The balcony area had been coated with waterproofing material and looked like it might still be drying, so we didn’t venture out there. We also got to see the cupboards that have been created between the rooms, which are long and narrow, but which will provide us with some much needed storage space. This innovative solution was suggested by our builder when I said I was worried we wouldn’t have enough space to store larger items, such as our suitcases.

Next week, we are having a meeting with our builder and architect to look at the interior design – the part I really like! I am definitely looking forward to the selection process. We have already talked about the benchtop material for our kitchen and the colour of the tatami-style tiles, now we need to choose the colours of all the other surfaces. It’s a pity that the wood of the frame is going to be covered, because the colour of the wood is really beautiful.

On the way back from The Frame, we decided to explore what was behind the very large torii on the next road over from the road leading up to our building site. Torii mean there is a shrine somewhere behind them, but we had no idea what it was and how far up the hill it was, because it is a wooded area. So we headed through and climbed the stairs that lead up to a plateau, which had a path to the entrance of the shrine, but interestingly also had a large parking area, which was filled with buses. It was a parking lot for the bus company that runs around Kyoto and up to the Kyoto Women’s University, which is just the other side of the torii.

Ahead of us was the entrance to the shrine, but still no clue as to what was there. There was a small building up further, which is the place where you pay the entrance fee and can buy small amulets related to the shrine – most temples and shrines have such a place. We asked the man what the place was and he told us it was the mausoleum of Toyotomi Hideyoshi!! I had no idea that he had been interred in Kyoto, although I knew he died here.

So, we paid the entrance fee and as we were about to go in, the man in the booth said it was up some stairs and would take about half an hour…he wanted know if we could make it ok!!! So, being the cavalier people we are (???) we said we would be ok – Craig even said we were fit! I would suggest it’s more like “fitter than I used to be, but we’ll give it a go”; after all, we climbed up to Kurama dera via the back way – once.

So, we go through entrance gate and are faced with a set of stairs going straight up the side of the hill. They were broken up into five sections, with a short level area between each section. I’m not sure how many stairs were in each section, but I’m guessing somewhere between 60 and 70. Not to be immediately defeated, I put my head down and started up. I had to stop a few times, but overall I did a lot better than I initially thought I would.

 (yes, this is half way up)

At the top of the stairs was another plateau and another gate, which I hoped led through to the mausoleum. Just before the gate, leaning against a tree, was a broom. The brooms here look like classic witches brooms, so my immediate thought was that it would have been much easier flying up here…Craig agreed.

On through the gate and we are confronted by another staircase – not as long as the first, but still a long way up, this time without any plateaux. By this time my legs were feeling a little less solid, so it was a bit harder going up, with the burn starting about half way up. After several rests to catch my breath and try to beat the lactic acid out of my thighs, we made it to the top. There was a five stone pagoda which sat on top of the burial mound of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. It was in a lovely setting on top of the hill, surrounded by trees.

We paid our respects and then rested for a while before starting the long descent. On the way out, I asked the man how many stairs there were up to the mausoleum. He said there were 489. Adding on the stairs up to the entrance, that was 522 in total (we counted them on the way out). My legs started stiffening up after we got home and I had had a cup of tea. I tried to get up to clean my cup and found that gravity had increased; or was it that my legs weren’t working as well as before??

Before I sign off, there is just one thing I haven’t mentioned in the last two posts, but which is a source of endless delight for me. Since the beginning of September, the signs of Halloween have been in evidence in nearly every shop you go into, with multitude decorations for sale, along with Halloween packaging on many standard food items and drinks and special Halloween food items for sale, especially cakes. It has been very difficult for me not to buy many, many items, although I have bought a few decorations for our flat, including one for the front door.

That’s all for now!!!!!

Cheers

It seems that I am finding it a little more difficult making the time to put together my posts recently, with time on the laptop being taken up doing marketing stuff…yes, stuff. It’s a technical term to cover pretty much anything we have been and are doing to try to get our name out ‘there’. We have been working hard to create a web site and Facebook page for our Minshuku and then trying to find avenues to push our business into the public realm. I suspect this will take a lot of time to achieve results.

We have also been grappling with bureaucracy here again and occasionally visiting our ever growing building site – once known as The Block. It is now more like The Frame and soon to be The Enclosure, or something. It keeps growing and now looks quite big. Somewhat comforting, given how much we’re spending on it!

So, to the website; we ‘went live’ just over a week ago, after a few issues with connecting to PayPal and Google. This is, in fact where the bureaucratic issues started. The lengths that you have to go to to prove who you are and that you are a legitimate business these days is quite cumbersome. This is exacerbated by the fact that these organisations are generally located in America and so have different terms and requirements to the Japanese, for some things. One issue we had to respond to was whether we were going to be trading in America and promising that we would pay our taxes in America if we did.

A lot of this, of course, has been brought about by the flow of monies between countries from criminal organisations, and for funding terrorism, as well as people trying to avoid paying tax in general. While none of this applies to us, of course, we still have to go through all the paperwork to prove our credentials. The end result is that we will be accepting payments via PayPal and we just received confirmation that we have been ‘indexed’ by Google. Being indexed means that people may now be able to find us through a Google search, if they use the right terms and if there aren’t many, many others competing to get their attention…

Trying to make yourself visible on Google is an art in itself. Having the right search ‘words’ (which can also mean phrases), being up to date, having things that people might be interested in seeing, and so on. There are many web sites dedicated to advising just how to do this, but, none-the-less, there are no guarantees. So, we have to wait, hope and continue trying to make links. Anyway, the address of our site is:

www.veganminshuku3neko.com

If you have any comments, or any suggestions, please email them to me.

Craig has also created a Facebook page to try to get our name out ‘there’. Updates of the building progress will be added to this page, along with other things such as food notes and links to relevant organisations. Other marketing stuff we have been doing includes gradually finding all the vegan and vegetarian travel oriented websites and listing ourselves on the most popular sites, such as HappyCow.

In terms of The Frame, ie our new home, it continues to grow, fast. On the Thursday after my last posting, we went to the bank to open a business account with the person who has been the translator at the meetings with our builder. We were supposed to go to the frame raising ceremony after this adventure, however, the day turned out to be quite wet and, as a result, building work was suspended for the day, which meant that the ceremony had to be delayed. So, on the Friday, we decided to go up to see how far along the building was. To say I was stunned as we rounded the corner is a massive understatement – I was literally lost for words (which, for me…). There was this massive wooden structure, with a roof on it! The workers were in the process of finishing the metal roof cladding as we arrived.

We have been up to have a look once more since then (they went ahead with the frame ceremony as soon as they finished, so didn’t have time to notify us) and there were only two workers on site, who were adding floors and commencing the walls. We were able to walk around the ground floor (or the first level, as it is here) and get a real feel for how it was going to be when enclosed. Today we’ll go back again to get another update – we don’t want to harass the carpenters too much!!

I mentioned above that we also had been grappling with bureaucracy again. This involved us trying to open a bank account, visiting a car dealer to enquire about buying a car and meeting with some insurance people to find out about insurance for our new home, as well as car insurance so that we now have the full costs of owning a vehicle and exactly what car insurance covers here.

(a Toyota Sienta – the car we are planning to buy)

At the bank we had to complete a form which was a pre-application – yes, we still have to complete an actual application form before we can open an account. The pre-application was to enable them to do checks on our company and see if there are any issues, particularly as we are foreigners. Anyway, they must have been happy with what they found (or didn’t find) because we have now received a letter telling us to come back to the bank to complete the application form. (it didn’t, by the way, say that we had been approved to open an account, just to come back). Later this week we will return to the bank armed with all our certificates, personal id and inkan, along with our interpreter, to open our account. It was proven to me that we needed to have the interpreter when even she had some difficulties knowing exactly what information they wanted when completing the pre-application form.

We also have to take updated company certificates for this visit, because the ones we had were over six months old – by two days. This meant a trip to the Legal Affairs Bureau yesterday, and a fee to pay to get the updated copies of the certificates. Luckily it was a nice day, so we decided to walk along the Kamogawa to get there; just under 3.5kms. A 7km round trip, low 30s temperature but not too humid so fairly comfortable, with dragonflies flitting around us and the various birds doing their thing. The Kamo was quite high because of recent rains brought by the typhoon that passed through here. Small fish were leaping up the few rapids. Very pleasant.

That brings me to the weather…we have had a couple of days that tried to resume the run of hot and humid (mushi mushi) weather, but most days are now in the low 30s or high 20s and not as humid as previously. Much more enjoyable. The only blip has been the typhoon which came through a couple of days ago, but as it happened we were spared the worst of it in the end. It was expected to go right over us – top winds of 160km/h and around 300mm of rain – however, it must have move further north than they expected, so we didn’t get too much of either.

Well, that’s it for now

Cheers

…and so I find myself in front of the keyboard again, wondering how to start…

Hi all, after yet another slight hiatus, here I am again bringing you all up to date with what has been happening this week in Kyoto – except it’s two weeks since my last transmission, so it should be these weeks in Kyoto. The main reason for the delay this time is that we only have one laptop on which to undertake larger tasks such as long emails, blogging and developing websites. During this period we have been putting together as much as we can for our minshuku website, hence the laptop has been fully occupied unless we are out.

In relation to our website, we are very close now to being able to ‘go live’, with a few minor edits to undertake and we have to open a bank account for our company before we can create a PayPal account to accept deposits for bookings. Hopefully we will have this completed by the end of this week. After we publish the site, we will also be creating a Facebook page to start our marketing effort. Then we start putting the word out and hoping for bookings.

On the other front, the construction of our house/minshuku is moving apace. In the last two weeks, the foundations have been finished. Quite a complicated process, involving three pours and lots of reo and formwork. As of my last post, the first pour into the base of the earthworks had occurred and the reo was being put on top of that. After it was completed some formwork was put around the reo to frame the edges. Then the second pour occurred.

I thought that would be it but when we went up to The Block a few days later some further formwork had been put on top of that to create bases for the walls of our structure and, in fact, the third pour had already occurred! Before work started at The Block, we had been told that the foundations would have to be inspected and approved by the authorities before anything further happened. So, I thought there would be a longish delay between them being finished and the framework starting…however, we received an email on the weekend indicating that the framework should be fully completed by the 7^th – ie this Thursday!!!!!!

Yesterday (Monday), we went up to see how far along they were and found around ten men working feverishly attaching the base beams to the foundations and building scaffolding around the entire base, which is over two storeys high. A screen will then be put around the whole scaffolding structure – in fact they were already starting to attach the screen when we got there. Having watched a new home being built across the road from our house in Adelaide, I am astounded at how fast this is all proceeding. We have been invited to visit the structure on Thursday, to have a look inside. Apparently you would normally have a framework raising ceremony at this time, but they indicated that it would be expensive, so said they weren’t planning one. It seems it is a Shinto ceremony, at which a Shinto priest officiates.

(our name printed on pre-formed beams!)

One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is the weather!!!! We had been having a run of days of 35 or more (and humid…) for the last few weeks and it was getting harder to go out knowing that it you would become a walking puddle almost immediately. The 30^th was yet again 35C and it seemed that it might just continue on for a while…then, on the 31^st, it was around 31C and it has been hovering around that temperature ever since! A very sudden change and it really does make it easier to face going out shopping, etc. Lovely. We have been able to open the windows at night to let fresh air in and we haven’t had the air cons on all night!!

(Serena thinks it’s hot)

We did undertake one ‘touristy’ outing during this period, despite the heat/humidity, and it was certainly worth it. We went to another shrine we had never been to, which involved a train ride, short walk and then a longer bus ride to get there (the reason we hadn’t been before). The shrine was built in 947CE by the then emperor in honour of a well known scholar and politician, Sugawara no Michizane. In 986CE, he was deified, with this being the first shrine in Japan to enshrine a person as a deity. Sugawara no Michizane was a prodigy child, able to read poetry at five years of age. He was writing poetry in Chinese at the age of 11. As a result, he is best known as the god of academics.

There are many cows in this shrine, as cows are believed to be messengers of the gods and it seems there may have been a connection between Sugawara no Michizane and cows. As a result, students who visit this shrine to pray to Tenjin (as the deified Sugawara no Michizane is known) for good results also seek out the cows to assist them. Generally, this takes the form of rubbing the head of the cow and then touching their own heads.

The shrine sits on a huge block of land and incorporates many buildings and a large garden. There are nearly 2,000 plum blossom trees (this being Tenjin’s favourite tree – apparently he wrote a haiku at the age of 5 about the plum blossom) along with around 300 maple trees. As a result, the shrine is one of the recommended places to visit during blossom time and in Autumn. One thing that drew my attention is the carvings around the base of the roof line on the rear and sides of the main hall. They are very intricate, highly coloured and are beautiful. They remind me of the carvings on one of the buildings in the temple and shrine complex at Nikko.

I have nothing in particular to report from the land of tv this post, in part because we haven’t seen as much tv recently, being occupied with the website and other issues, such as finding an accounting package I can use for the minshuku. It seems these days that you can’t buy accounting software as a one off purchase. All products appear to now be online, with a monthly fee attached.

Well, that’s about it for this post – there’s just one final item, the name we have decided for our minshuku:

Vegan Minshuku Sanbiki Neko

Sanbiki Neko translates as 3 cats. We felt we had to include them somehow, especially since the architect included them in all the iterations of our building plans.

Cheers!

(here’s a photo of me! Well, my tiger striped feet, anyway)