When a white guy falls in love with a geisha....you get a nice restaurant.

Today I met up with Reg for lunch. I haven’t seen him in a while so it was nice to catch up. We ended up going to the restaurants on the upper floor of Saty. After lunch we studied at Mister Donuts for a few hours til I met up with everyone to go to the bar with Jason. Jason was introducing us to a new restaurant/bar that he goes to in Kyoto. The Boy came and met me and my place and we met Phil and Laurel at Kameoka station.

We were going to meet up with Jason and Dara once we got into the city so we stopped at Nijo Station to call them. Dara was still at work and said she would join us later. Jason came to meet us in a taxi at Nijo since we couldn’t understand his directions. He kept saying to go to the Starbucks on the corner of Yanagibanba street and Shijo street, but I didn’t know where that was. The Boy didn’t know off the top of his head either, and I had kind of been counting on him knowing…

Jason had our taxi follow his and we got to the restaurant without trouble. It was on a small side street coming off of Shijo street, one I have probably walked past many times and just haven’t noticed.

The restaurant, Gogyo, was actually built by the nephew of J.P. Morgan. This nephew came to Japan and apparently fell in love with a geisha. The geisha, however, was in love with another man, and hoping to marry him so she rejected all of the nephew’s advances. The geisha was disappointed though when the man she loved chose to marry someone else (respectable men did not marry geisha) so she contacted the nephew, who had left Japan, and told him she wanted to marry him. The nephew, being an idiot, came back to Japan and married her. The restaurant is in the home that they lived in together.



We sort of did a kind of tapas style dinner where we ordered various dishes and then shared them. We had “sea grapes” or umibudou, from Okinawa. It is seaweed that looks like little bunches of grapes. We also had this amazing salad that had what tasted like Thousand Island dressing on it. Kind of 懐かしいsince that was my favorite salad dressing when I was a kid. The restaurant was also famous for ramen so we all ordered and shared ramen dishes as well. It was called burnt? ramen and had a very distinctive flavor. But it was delicious. The ramen The Boy and I got was in a black colored soup. It was much better than the salt ramen that Phil and Laurel got (^_~).

After we finished eating, we went up to the bar, Kura. They had Guinness on tap, well kind of. It was as close to draught Guinness as you can get without it actually being on tap. So I was excited, until Laurel and Jason took it and drank it…which meant I got another even though I had to work the next day….


(I really only put this in because I thought it was the best picture of Jason ever. I have no idea what he is laughing at.)

We had a lot of fun up at the bar with a couple languages flying around. I tried to keep the boy up on what was going on when we fell into long spells of English. He is surprisingly good about such things. Even when he gets tired and he’ll try to listen. When I offer to leave he says no because I’m having a good time and because he wants to get better at English and, well, immersion is the best way, even when it hurts.

He doesn’t really like crowds so we ended up getting separated from everyone else on the train ride home, which was good because it gave him a break from all the intense English. I could tell that even though he is patient, he was happy to be back in Japanese mode.

I always feel bad whenever I make him deal with so much English until I remember that a few hours with my friends is less than what I do. I am always in Japanese mode when I hang out with him so it is really nice that he makes the effort to do things in English with me.