How do you like Gion?

Um, well, it's becoming a bit little dizzy land for my taste but we're staying in a really nice place mainly with Japanese on the age of the area so we come down and we're eating there at night, looking in the antique sections down in ○○ and things like that. But the actual main drag is becoming a little bit too touristy for us. I mean, the places like Naoshima the island--it's a fishing village. Hardly any people around, people were a lot friendlier and we got to eat really absolutely splendid Japanese food at nice little places. That was delicious, whereas here it's becoming a lot more expensive, as I said. But we're everywhere, as I said. We're tourists too but we try to avoid the mainstream, Disney sections of cities.

Where else in Kyoto have you been?

We went down to Nara just to have a look at the biggest timber building, which was astonishing because I'm not in architecture, but I mean...... when we went down to Naoshima we basically we set aside four days to do all of the Benesse architectural art...they're just stunning. And we went over to Tashima, and so Kyoto, we've only had a day here, two days here before. Last time, we stayed in a lovely little ○○ up in the park here. That was great but we didn't have much time to do... But we're sort of little templed out, and we had fun things like Nishiki market and things like that. My wife's an inveterate researcher of shopping! And the park...we went out in the huge free market in the temple complex, don't ask me the name, I don't know them all. Sounds like Toji market... Yeah, the Toji market. Took me hours there. And the temple was beautiful too.

Have you been anywhere else in Japan?

We came in and out through Tokyo and we only had a day and a half on the way in and we didn't really feature it because we nearly had a week the last time. We got a Japanese speaking friend from Sydney, Australia. He's worked there for 20 years, fluent, and in a day and a half we probably achieved as much as we could do in a week. Because she knew where she was going and yeah.

What made you come back to Japan?

We were in twice..... in fact the first time it was just because we could get a week stop-over at she had a lovely big apartment in ○○. So we stayed at a nice apartment and we did a lot of Tokyo and broke the trip, 24 hour trip from Sydney to London was a little bit pain and this time, and this time we came back for specifically for a short one-country trip because I had a fairly major illness last year, but we just thought that we should try it out. We have been away for like three months but it's a fascinating culture and the architecture is brilliant. And if I can keep her away from the antique shops we will be able to afford getting home.