Kyoto

This is ripped off of an email, but hey it's what I've been up to for the last week. Hugs all.

The aquarium was set up by fantastic Japanese design principles. So you took an escalator all the way to the top, and then you walked a slow spiral down. You know the Guggenheim?  It's the famous modern art museum in NYC that's built by the same design principle which makes for a very easy and pleasant visit. You can't get lost, because you only go one direction, and it's a gentle downhill slope the whole time.

What's especially cool about this is that the tanks can then be incredibly deep, like three stories deep, which means the animals have their little enclosure and can dive with a lot more room than it appears. It's also cool because of course the ocean is a vertical ecosystem as much as a horizontal one, and you get to experience it that way.

So at the top they have otters, I love otters so much, because they're always doing something. These ones were gnawing their adorable little paws in a cuddle puddle together. Then down to the ring tailed something from Japan I'd never seen, and this awesome Asian wombat kind of creature who looked like he was made for a Disney movie. I'm talking big eyes fluffy body.

Ok on to the fish which is what you care about. They had a coral reef tank but it wasn't the focus. I mean reef fish are pretty, but 1. I have been snorkelling in way better real reefs than are in this tank and 2. They just didn't bring out the big guns, you know the top level rainbow Hawaii fish or whatever.

Dolphins! They had a variety I had never seen which had black and white stripes. Like markings, a white underbelly and then the top of them mostly black but with some white striping as well. And they were so active, both cresting their fins over the water surface all the time and diving down, sometimes two together like a pair. And here's the thing, because of the structure of the aquarium you encountered this same tank like two or three times, so the same dolphins you saw diving from the top you would then see them underwater further down.

They had king penguins and like three other kinds, and at one point one penguin made a pile of snow and stood on top of it and another penguin bit him on the tail. The king penguins formed an orderly line to jump in the water.

The biggest tank had whale sharks and hammerheads. Woah hammerheads look small when compared to whale sharks. And like at least four varieties of rays and some schooling fish. The muscularity of the whale shark tails were like the best part of the whole thing.  They just did this slow loop and they were huge, but that was the middle tank so you did a slow downward spiral across the whole tank. See what I did there?

And there were some fish I'd never seen, things that looked like bass, but huge and prehistoric and a fish with legs also like the size of a dog and fish that looked like half a fish.

And the jellyfish section was very special, some incredible colors, like blooming roses some of these.

Ok while I'm here I might as well talk about the 10,000 tori temple. It was a temple to the goddess Inari. Inari you will remember is not only the delicious sweet tofu pocket which is a food, but also the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Her symbol is the fox. Foxes apparently love inari the food as a special treat. The fox is a trickster god because wealth and prosperity is tricksy.

But the temple is structured with you know those square gates in front of the temple, tori gates. So you can go on a path that's 10, 000 of them in a row, just a really long archway up a hill of these gates and along the way there's a million little shrines and bells and fox statues. Very pretty. And I had inari fox soup at one of the little cafes. And a bunch of girls dress up in traditional kimono and go up the temple, presumably for a reason.

Jes and I hung out at a cat cafe where each of the cats had like a dating profile you could read. It was pretty cute.

We made friends with everyone at the Nepalese restaurant and bar down the street, and that's actually how we wound up going to the aquarium because they recommended it.

And of course Japan is a pokemon go wonderland. We're busily levelling.