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So today I went to Kyoto. I am not actually feeling too well. I guess it is from the exposure to the various Japanese kids. I`m not saying Japanese children are disease ridden mites, just that exposure in a small room to large numbers of new Japanese youngsters means that the diseased ridden kids are contagious. Only kidding.

So yes I went to Kyoto. In Japanese it is pronounced as Kyo as one syllable ie. Kyo-to not Kee-yo-to. It is a wondrous city about an hour and a half`s drive from Osaka with an excellent shop which sells my favourite flavour of ice cream which is green tea flavoured. Oishee! It is the third time I have been there. We also went to the main temple area in the centre of the city. I got my fortune read by pulling a rod out of a cylindrical box. The fortune was medium good - vague notions of troubles ahead but if you stay strong and confront them it will be okay. Okay. After you read the piece of paper corresponding to the rod, you fold it up and tie it to a string net on the side of the stall. You do this especially if you have got a bad or very bad luck result to ward against the future troubles. This fortune costs 200 yen.

In fact, Kyoto to me seems to be completely geared to making money off of tourists - the Japanese as well as Westerners. And there are many Westerners. Reiko and I play a game each time we go there of how many Westerners we can spot. There are far more here than there are in Osaka or Kobe. Americans and Australians predominantly but Canadians and English as well as those from many other European countries. We could count over one hundred of them in less than one hour. When I visited Japan on holiday in April, we came to Kyoto and played at being tourists. Entrance to all the temples costs money and sometimes there are places inside these temples that require an additional charge. When praying in front of Shrines and the like, there are metal boxes for you to throw in money as offerings to the Gods. This may well be part of the age old traditions but you get the feeling that the amount of money being raised through offerings and entrance charges is more than adequate for the general upkeeping and rent and employment charges and is geared instead to making a healthy profit from tourism - something which seems alien to the minimalist philosophy of the Buddhism and Shinto religions. Of course Christianity, with charges for entrance to the major cathedrals of Europe being one example, is also to blame as far as this is concerned.

Another interesting fact about Kyoto is that the Kyoto council only allowed the Mcdonalds company to build their restaurants there if they got rid of the large neon lights and replace the yellow neon lit M on red background with a non-neon M with brown background in order to not ruin the Kyoto skyline.