Maiko'd

[Edit: I've gone back and added some comments. Originally, all that was here was this next bit in green.]
I don't have time to write anything coherent here, but have some picture spammery.

The girls are Anna and Meli, and they invited me along to take ze pictures. Because I am a camera whore. I'll try to remember to make this a little less spastic later.

I have no idea how I'm going to format a post with this many pictures in it.

Okay, so there's this pile of pictures. The main story behind what happened is that Meli found a place called Maika that will dress you up as a geisha, maiko, or samurai. Now, to the average Western person, this sounds kind of silly: "Why would I want someone to dress me up like a prostitute?" you might ask. In reality, geisha aren't and never were specifically prostitutes. They were not paid for sex, and it wasn't and isn't part of the job. If there is sex on the side, that's purely by choice of the geisha and the client.
In other words, geisha are entertainers, not prostitutes. They are skilled in many things, from musical instruments to singing to playing go, which is kind of othello for people with too much time on their hands.

Anyway! Meli (the shorter girl) and Anna (in the green kimono) went and got themselves all maiko'd up. I have to admit that I'm not particularly fond of maiko even when they're pros, so I'm likely fairly biased in that I don't think it turned out too well. I mean, they looked decent, but they're both fairly cute anyway, and I have to say I wouldn't recommend the place to others. The cheapest plan is $65 and the cheapest plan that doesn't suck is around $100. Tack another $32 onto that if you want your hair actually done up instead of just a wig.

For that kind of money, I'd buy a portable hard drive or something - on that note, I really need more storage. I'm running out of space to put all the pictures I'm taking.

Anyway, we headed up there around noon, found the place around one, and had some food while we waited for the appointment at 2. It took about an hour for them to do up the girls, and Hamid and Kazunori and myself wandered around the area, sampled some food a temple gave us (some sort of delicious thing with peanuts, dunno the name) and generally killed time.

I got this picture of Hamid while we were doing this and I think it's one of the best of him I've seen. He looks sort of odd, and I almost missed the shot 'cause he wasn't trying to pose, but I think that's what really makes it.

There was also some random fauna in one of the temples, as evidenced by the random pigeon (that's a pigeon, right?) at left and the turtle-ish thing at right. The pigeon was difficult 'cause he kept walking - damned pigeon - which entails a lot of head-bobbing. At that range, it's difficult to get the focus right, so I have about 90% of the shots where the focal point is off by about an inch in the Z-axis.

Anyway, after that, we got back, waited a few minutes, and the girls came out to the room where you're supposed to take pictures of them. This room was terrible for taking pictures. It has dim orange lights (at least they were soft lights) which completely kill skin color and make them look undead if I correct for it, and... I don't know, really. In any case, I wasn't getting very good shots. You can tell these ones apart from the others because of the weird painted grass/flower background. In case you're wondering, the girls needed help to sit down and to stand up. You can see Hamid fixing Anna's kimono after a sitting at right.
Everybody agreed that picture was the best of the indoor ones, if I recall.

I didn't really crop any of these, so the composition is what I got straight from the camera. I tweaked the colors on a couple of them because of weird things that happened due to various things, but these are about half exposed in manual, and half on full-auto. I took about 210 pictures that day, of which about 20 were a complete loss, and about 30 came out decently. The rest are mediocre or very similar shots I took in case one or another ended up blurry or something happened.

They had the girls pose by a shrine that was nearby, but they weren't allowed to go in. I can guess at the reason, but I don't have a solid answer on why that is.

And some walking back...



On the way back, we saw this big pigeon-shaped thing. I think it was a bird, but it might've been a rock. When I got up, it flew away, though, so I'm fairly certain it wasn't just any rock.