The building itself seems to be on Japan’s historic place register, whatever that’s called. (A dim memory suggests “Tangible Cultural Asset.”) Or so I interpreted the plaque on the corner, without actually bothering to find out if I could read any of it. Entirely church-y and lovely, if not particularly inspired, inside and out. I walked in behind a Korean couple toting a baby boy, and followed them up the aisle; the congregation for the service was small enough to fit in the choir. There were twenty or so in attendance: two or three Japanese, a Chinese woman, the Koreans, a vacationing Australian couple, a few Brits. The priest was American, as was the fellow who accompanied the hymns on recorder.

I was just getting over my social discomfort and beginning to feel happy I’d shown up when things went south. I should explain that, as a semi-closeted arch-conservative, I have little tolerance for liberalism in religion; I’d rather spend time with, say, a Muslim who disagreed fiercely but cordially with me than someone who maintains the forms of Christianity but won’t assert its content. This makes me nearly allergic to Western Episcopalians. I had hoped, though, that a small overseas congregation in a profoundly un-Christian country might be composed of more staunch believers; otherwise, I thought, what would be the point? You certainly don’t have to go to church to keep up appearances around here.

Of course I was disappointed. And in a hurry, too, right after the Scripture readings. The order of worship read, as expected, “sermon.” Which is precisely what the priest proceeded not to deliver. So help me, he stood up and said, “Now, what do you get out of those readings?” It wasn’t an ill-conceived game of guess-what’s-in-my-head serving as a segue into a lesson on something we should have gotten out of the readings. It was twenty minutes of three congregants batting around ideas that ranged from inane to heretical while the priest agreed with everything and the rest of us stared uncomfortably at our shoes.

The Old Testament reading from Nehemiah, which remembers God’s taking of land away from pagan peoples to give it to the Israelites, prompted the elderly British gentleman to my left to launch into a harangue on the importance of remembering the plight of those pagan peoples, whom, in his view, Israel was actually guilty of “repressing.” Also he worked in a jab at the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, which in his mind was related. The New Testament reading, the account from Acts of the stoning of St. Stephen, mentions that a young man named Saul was in attendance. “Who is this Saul?” someone asked. “Paul,” another answered. “Really?” “Well, that’s the legend, the myth,” said the priest. The accompanist was very excited by the same passage because, he explained, he reads the Bible “very metaphorically,” and enjoys finding in it the occasional “snapshot” of the early Church that rates as historical according to the extra-biblical sources by which he defines factuality.

And so I’m back to square one.

I spent the rest of the daylight hours in my room, cleaning, writing, and editing video until Sean appeared in the early evening, wanting to go shopping. We’d pretty much exhausted the options available to us on foot–our corner of the city isn’t its liveliest–so we decided to use bicycles to expand our range. Bicycles are big here. Most major thoroughfares designate about a third of the width of their broad sidewalks as bicycle traffic lanes. (Pedestrians and cyclists alike mostly ignore the designations. And most people ride cheap Chinese bicycles that cost around a hundred bucks or less and so aren’t generally worth stealing and therefore don’t need to be locked up very carefully. (The most common variety of lock is simply a spring-loaded hoop bolted to the frame that can extend through the rear wheel to keep it from turning.)

In our dorm’s sheltered bicycle parking area are several old beaters that Szymon identified as common property; all we had to do if we wanted to use them was break their locks and fill their tires. (The keys had disappeared with the original owners.) By the time we’d liberated the bikes and gotten them more or less rideable, rain was falling with some conviction, so we set out like locals: one hand on the handlebars and the other holding up a 100-yen umbrella. Note: this is dangerous behavior on wet crowded sidewalks, especially if your brakes don’t quite stop your bike in a timely fashion, like ours didn’t.

We made it down to Shijō street without incident, locked our bikes, and joined the rushing stream of pedestrians on the bright and endless covered sidewalks of what is probably Kyoto’s premier shopping district. A turn away from the street led us into a dazzling two-story arcade of shops and eateries of every description, aimed mostly at youth with disposable income. When we came to the end of the arcade, passages opened on either side to parallel arcades just as long and crowded: a consumer labyrinth built into a city block.

Since coming back to Japan, I had been doubting my earlier memories of the women here, so many of whom had seemed so punishingly pretty two years ago. This time they had been appearing in a much less unfair hot-to-not ratio. I wondered if I had just been blinded before by the excitement of being in a new place.

Turns out I was just in the wrong part of Kyoto. Or the right part for studying a demanding traditional art with the minimum of distraction, anyhow. The girls down on Shijō are incandescent.

We didn’t have much time to blind ourselves staring at them, though, because already the shops were closing up. We found our way out of the maze and stopped into a local fast food chain restaurant called First Kitchen, which offers a choice of some 8 or so flavored salts on its french fries: I had a cheeseburger with pizza fries. The burger barely achieved mediocrity, but the fries made me want to come back to try the other flavors.

We got back to the dorm wet but uninjured, and spent the rest of the evening studying for the first of our Monday morning quizzes.