Kyoto 2018: When a typhoon isn’t on the itinerary

I am politely awakened by the front desk wondering via intercom if I would like my room cleaned, and I realize it’s 10am.

I have plans, big plans today. I mean to visit Ryoan-ji, the Zen temple with its famous rock garden, and possibly attain enlightenment while I meditate over its enigmatic boulders.

Typhoon Trami snuffs this out.

If you’re planning on taking trains, I think both JR and Keihan are suspending services by 12 noon, says my cousin S, who is a geophysicist? – scientist! – currently attached to one of the Kyoto universities.

I should like to note at this point that I selected my flat specifically for its unbeatable location – right smack in between the JR and Keihan Fushimi-Inari stations.

Cousin S also tells me that establishments will be shuttering early in anticipation of another storm. They have a higher emphasis on safety here than we do in the Philippines.

Right. I peek out the window. It’s certainly gray, but in a dry, sharp sort of way, and since I am a girl from the Third World, where resilience means we’ve all mutated to adapt to sewage-strewn floods and *cough* government incompetence, I decided to venture outside anyway.

But only you know, to take a look around the area. Ryoan-ji will have to wait.

Google Maps took me on a pleasantly cloudy walk to Tofukuji – one of the five great Zen temples of Kyoto – instead, but then Google Translate told me it was closed.

So I wandered forlornly around the gardens, drifted along the Tsuten-kyo bridge (it was too early in the fall for the crowd-drawing foliage), peered one last time at the revered sanmon, and glumly made my way back downhill.

After crossing the railway, I happened to look up, and found… a cat cafe.

I was already feeling quite out of sorts and the day was just progressively getting gloomier, so I headed upstairs in search of some furry consolation.

Behold, my only friends:

The manager

A mood

Also a mood

Or is it a meowd?

Restored my sangfroid with these (mostly) rescue kitties just as Trami’s winds began to pick up, cold gusts rudely slamming into people, playing havoc with hair and coats and umbrellas. I managed to dash to the nearby supermarket and make it back to the flat before the typhoon hit.

And by hit, I mean it… rained heavily. The wind howled and tossed some leaves around, but that was it, and I mused to myself, tucked snugly in my ultramodern little flat, after a hot shower ( I used Google Translate on all those buttons, like a true provincial) and a gyoza dinner, that there were worse places to be stranded in during a typhoon than metropolitan Japan.

When I woke up, it was bright and sunny, without so much as a stray tree branch or murky flood in sight.

And it was my birthday. Meow.