Moving from the beautiful to the profound to the downright ugly, this is central Kyoto. Try to spend as little time as possible here for obvious reasons. It's convenient for a lunch break, as you can pop into the equivalent of a diner for a quick bite of Japanese equivalent of junk food. You sit on a stool at the counter, and of course all the staff give you a big shout out when you walk in (and out) like you're long lost friends. Then you can order things like fried pork on rice, or pretty much anything on rice, or barbecued chicken. It's all kind of familiar, but not. You can even get Japanese pizza in special dive-y restaurants called Okonomiyaki, which is one of my favorites, and I don't think available outside Japan. It's like a cross between a pizza and a pancake, with the ingredients all kind of baked into the dough. No cheese, no tomato sauce but all the usual meat toppings. Often they just bring you the raw ingredients and you make it yourself because you'll be sitting in front of a grill, which is a fun way to experiment, especially if you don't know what you're doing. Of course you can have sushi all over the place, but we tended to have that as a more leisurely dinner.

Besides the ugliness of downtown, I wanted to show you what passes for electioneering in Kyoto. That slowmoving garishly decorated bus with loudspeakers all over it is carrying a political candidate. It manages to snarl traffic, cause earsplitting noise with blaring musak and jingles, and look even uglier than its surroundings. Yet somehow every politician thinks this is the way into the voters' hearts.