by her g-mom. g-mom can't believe that i walked around kyoto bymyself today. what else to day b/c she won't leave the hotel room b/c it's sprinkling? i wasted 2 hours this morning waiting for it to dry up to see if she wanted to go with to Nishiki fish market but it didn't and left on my own.
went to nishiki, amazing. covered streets lined with thousands of stalls selling lots of fresh seafood, produce, and other foodstuffs. lots of cool sights to look at, fresh octupus, squid, snapper, and who knows what else. also lots of shops, bought some really pretty fabric to make pillows, curtains with. it looks a little on the edge of too "urban outfitterish" but better. then went to daimaru, a 9 story department store. the makeup department was 5 times bigger than penn square. Shoes.....i got lost in the shoe department. then went to the basement where all the food items were to get g-mom's and my dinner.....got lost there. i'm not a person that gets lost. that's how big it is.
something that makes getting around extremely difficult is that the streets don't have names in kyoto and especially in tokyo. they're just sections within sections. kyoto has a slightly more gridlike system going on but nothing is in english.
i've been taking advantage of nostalgia to ask grandmother about growing up and getting married. she has never revealed too much about what it was like as a little girl growing up in tokyo, how she met my grandfather, moving to the US, etc. of course, i never really asked too much. i was told that she didn't like to talk too much about my grandfather who was killed during war (either Korean or Vietnam.....this shows how much I really don't know about him). she was 20 when she met him, he was a 21 year old GI that was invited by her father often to have dinner in their home. eventually it turned into more than just dinner and was followed by marriage. nothing could have prepared her for the next phase.....the sticks of Mississippi.
Herman was from Mississippi (i'm thinking the jackson or meridian area, if you are at all familiar) and they moved there. culture shock of alien proportions. to a japanese person whose bare feet never touch anything except the bath tub (not even the bathroom floor) and the bedsheets, she was mortified watching all the kids run around barefoot outside. "NO shoes! they po-or!"
poor thing. g-mom said if she had known enough english or met someone that knew enough japanese or knew where the airport was, she would have hightailed like a bat outta hell.
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