Uchiko, a historic small town

A new adventure! We took the trolley for the first time, successfully, to the train station, where we also managed to buy train tickets, successfully, to go to Uchiko, a small historic town south of Matsuyama. The train ride took us gradually out of the city, through suburbs and then villages interspersed with numerous rice paddies, and then into the green hills and through some tunnels until we arrived at Uchiko at about noon. There was supposed to be a "retro" bus that took tourists around to the hot spots, but we never saw it. We had a map and after wandering around for while, noticing that nothing seemed to be open and few people around, wondered if we were in the twilight zone. Perhaps everything closes for lunch. We finally decided to take a taxi to the far end and work our way back on foot. The taxi driver was friendly and pointed out several of the sites, in Japanese, so we weren't sure what we were looking at. He dropped us at the Kosyo-ji Temple, which is also on the 88-temple pilgrimage. After regaining some peace and calm, we started down through a designated historic district, which, aong other things, contains several residences of former wealthy wax magnates open to the public. We toured one, which also had a museum with very interesting displays of wax making, from sumac tree berries. This was a thriving industry in the early part of the century, but gradually declined after the rise of paraffin wax. We had a delicious and expensive iced coffee in a cafe right in the building, an outpost of modernity and blonde wood (bamboo?), reminiscent of Scandinavia, set inside the heavy dark logs of the original building. The streets were narrow, windy, and hilly, with many homes in traditional Japanese architecture, and lined with vendors of local food and unique crafts. Our final stop was a historic Kabuki theatre (men only, with elaborate makeup), which shows Kabuki only once every 2 years, but is used for other types of entertainment such as puppetry and concerts more frequently. We had an English-speaking tour guide of the theatre, who pointed out the cheap and expensive seats, and the various entrances in the back, sides, and underneath where the actors make dramatic entrances. We would have loved to see a performance, but, needless to say, our timing was off. :-) Apparently we would need to go to Tokyo or another large city where it might be more frequently performed. As an aside, while on the ferry the other day on TV I saw a performance of an all-female troupe, doing musical numbers, with women playing both men's and women's roles. Since they were all wearing similar heavy makeup, the male parts were distinguished by clothing and haircuts. The costumes got more and more elaborate, a over-the-top mixture of Ziegfeld follies, the Rockettes, and 40's musicals. Seth said the stars of this troupe are very famous in Japan.