Day 12 Downtown Kyoto

Everybody enjoys a free morning and we are only heading out at 1:30 pm catching a bus to Kawaramachi Sanjo - Downtown Kyoto - a fifty minutes ride from our hostel and then walk across to Nishiki markets:
exotic foods, produce and scenes, even light saver chop sticks!!!!!

 At 7pm we walk around the corner from the markets and get blasted with light, sound, mime, break dance, juggling and magic when the old toy factory becomes alive.......at GEAR ...an awesome modern Japanese Fairy tale.

GEAR performance – Charlie

Today the class spent the day wandering through the stores of inner Kyoto, taking note of the various shrines and landmarks around the marketplace of course. After dinner we regrouped and made our way to a tiny theatre not far from the markets to watch the performance of GEAR, an interesting, non-verbal play that focused more on body language and physical movement rather than words. The play follows the story of 4 emotion feeling robots (called 'Roboroids') as they continue their work in a long abandoned toy factory, producing lovely dolls with the spectacularly accurate name of 'Doll'. The show was utterly fantastic, the actors were all incredibly on-point and played their robot persona's with uncanny, almost unnerving, reality, with amazing physicality that would have you believing they were actually robots, and extraordinary talents that would leave you scratching your head in amazement. An all around enjoyment to watch and a must see for all ages.