Two Saturdays ago was a party sponsored by the Kansai Stanford Club, the local branch of the Alumni Association. First they took us on a tour of a nearby temple complex, which had beautiful gardens and gold-laden shrines to Buddhas but forbade photos. Then we came back to the Center for tons of free food, schmoozing with the alumni, and some performances: Camille doing some sort of hip hop stepping; Jonathan, intense kenjitsu (with a sword!); and Luther, impressive wu shu. Watch the video

Sunday was the Mifune Matsuri in the more rural, but no less touristy, Arashiyama area of Kyoto. Mifune means, literally, �gthree boats�h, but we were expecting a colorful armada to go sailing down the river. Instead, a small procession made its way from a local shrine to festively painted boats waiting at one end of the riverway, transferred some important person shrouded behind cloth to one of the boats, and returned. The boats then began poling upstream about half a kilometer, with priests playing music and miko (women shrine attendants) dancing. We rented some rowboats ourselves and got a nice up-close view of the action. Sometimes too close; but the nice thing about those long poles is the priests can use them to push us away too.

Arashiyama�fs got lots of famous shrines and temples and a nice riverbank, but more importantly, it has monkeys. Lots and lots of Japanese monkeys in this little park on the side of a mountain, right next to one of the shrines. As we climbed the hill monkeys were on either side of us, pondering whether we had any food. (We were warned not to stare at the monkeys or have food out as we entered. Don�ft make the monkeys mad.) When we got to the top we found their big hangout spot, where they scamper around amidst the tourists. Useful fact: Monkey mothers don�ft like their babies being photographed.