The weekend in Kyoto

So, I know that this will end up being long, so let's see how successful I can be at breaking it down.

Thursday

So, after classes on Thursday, Robyn, Phil, and I went back to our rooms to pack up our single backpack full of stuff for the weekend. Once we were ready, we headed to the bus stop in front of the college, and took a bus from the college to the kanazawa station. We found something to eat at the station, and then caught our bus from the station to Kyoto. It was basically like a greyhound bus, but with JR - the company that has a monopoly on all Japanese mass transportation. Within the four-hour drive, they stopped at rest stops every hour or so.

Once we arrived at Kyoto station, we went and searched out our first hotel which was a few blocks from the station. It was a ryokan - a Japanese-style inn. There were tatami rooms, where we slept on futons, and the bath was japanese style, but luckily was for private use. It was a really cute little place, and the hotel people were really nice.

Friday

In the morning, we headed off back to the station to meet for our tour with Johnny Hillwalker. He gives walking tours to foreigners in English. We walked from Kyoto station to near Kiyomizu temple. He showed us a few temples and shrines and a garden and a good view of the in-home industry in Japan. We saw fan-makers, tatami-makers, pottery-makers, and many other products made in the homes of Kyoto. He was very knowledgeable of religion and culture in Japan, so it was nice to hear information from a real Japanese man. In the tour, we not only went in the world's largest wooden building, but we stood under the heaviest bell. Also, we saw the former headquarters of Nintendo when it was making Japanese playing cards. I suggest the tour to anyone who visits Kyoto.

After the tour, we found our new hotel to drop off our backpacks (because they were killing us by then). It was realy cute. It was Japanese dorm-style. Robyn and I were in a dorm with 6 other ladies in a tatami style room, and Phil was in the guy dorm. After dropping off our bags, we searched out somewhere to eat on our way up to Kiyomizu-dera (dera=temple). It's a Buddhist temple up in the hills surrounding Kyoto. It gives great views of the city, and it's water is supposedly very pure, so we had a drink from their fountain. There were also a 3-story pagoda, and a few other temples and shrines in the area that we wandered around.

When it was getting time for the temples to be closing, we hit up the shops on the way back down, but they were closing really quickly so we ended up not getting much. (Just so you know, stores in Japan close at 730 and if they are around temples, probably around 6) So we headed down to the area of Gion to search out some Geisha. We saw a few running from one place to another, but the bugs were getting bad and we were tired, so we headed back to the hotel for a shower and sleep.

Saturday

In the morning, we got up and walked to a bus station to grab a bus to Nijo-jo (the second jo=castle). It's the old castle of Kyoto. It has a palace with nightingale floors that squeak when you walk on them. We wandered around the castle and the garden for a while.

It was here, I think, that we discovered the wonderful concept of Bench touring. With bookbags full of stuff and walking from place to place to save money, we soon found ourselves exhausted pretty quickly in the 85 degree weather with 95% humidity or so. The heat makes you crazy hot in no time. Also, because I've been hang-drying my clothes with cheap laundry-detergent, my clothes are all starchy and feel horrible in the heat. Because of all this, we developed this new form of sight-seeing. It involves going to quite a few places, but in the process, finding many places to sit down and camp out. We sat on benches, ditches, edges of hundreds of years old palaces. We sat around for about 15 minutes or so at each place, until we felt revived enough to move on. It's a great way to get around.

After Nijo-jo, we headed to Kyoto cheapest inn, our hotel for the night (seriously, that's its name). It had about 10 bunk-beds in about the smallest room that you could imagine that many being in. There were many random people staying there - scary Germans, some crazy-looking Americans, little Japanese ladies that ran in before bed and left before everyone else because most likely, she was just as scared as we were of the foreigners.

Anyway, after dropping off our bags at the inn, we walked to Kyoto Imperial Palace Park. It's a large park around the imperial palace. The park is public, and seems to be a common visit for people from Kyoto since there is very little other green areas with trees and grass around. We did a lot of bench touring there, as there were many benches around, and the park is about a mile wide. We walked the long length of it, but it took us about 3 hours because we took lots of breaks.

After walking across the very large park in central kyoto, we wandered out back into the city. With more benching, we wandered into stores and such.

By the way, if you need a contact case, don't look in Japan. Even though a large majority of them have contacts, I guess most of them were hard, which apparently now have different cases in Japan than soft. I had forgotten my contact case when packing for Kyoto, and so I had been looking for one all day. We found some in a couple of stores, but they were all around 900 yen (about $9!!). I finally found one for a bargain of 840 yen that I gave up and bought cause I couldn't do without it.

We walked down the street and wandered in the area until we randomly turned onto an alleyway that became a large walking mall. About 3 or 4 blocks of streets in that area were walking streets dedicated to all the different stores you could imagine. We did some shopping, ate some dinner, and some crepes for dessert in that area. It was really funny though, because inbetween the stores, you would randomly see a buddhist temple or multiple shinto shrines. It was crazy to see the old and the new so close together.

While heading back to the hotel, we decided we wanted to try pachinko, the gambling game of Japan. We wandered into a parlor, and while we were trying to figure out how to play, we were approached by a Japanese man who said "Japanese only" and motioned for us to leave. We were discriminated against because we were white! Hehe! No fee money for them!

After exhausting ourselves, we wandered back to the inn to take a shower and head to bed in our 3X3X5 ft area that we called our own for the night (one part of a bunk bed). That hotel was definitely an experience to remember.

Sunday

In the morning, I was able to grab the computer for a second to put up a short post, telling everyone I was still alive.

Then we headed out back into the city of Kyoto. We caught a bus that took us up from central Kyoto to North-western kyoto (our first bus since coming to the city). We went to see Kinkaku-ji, AKA the golden pavilion. As before, it was beautiful and glorious, but at the same time, packed with foreigners so much so that it took us a while to find a few places to bench at. Finally, we found a spot, and people-watched for a while. We enjoyed watching people go by, laughing at the other foreigners going by and noticing random things. While benching, we were approached by these middle-school Japanese kids from Tokyo who asked to talk with us. They were so cute! They had to talk to some foreigners on their trip for their English class so we answered a few of their questions and took pictures with them. It was so random!

After Kinkaku-ji, we headed towards another temple that we planned to go to and looked out for lunch. Yay for ramen! On the way there, we took lots of bench stops and at one point, it was really weird because at one point we were in the city, and the next it seemed we were wandering in the mountains of Japan. With the backpack and heat and all, it felt like philmont all over again.

We made it to the temple, and we benched for about 2 hours there. They had a 5-story pagoda along with numerous other temples and such. We took lots of pictures, and we watched foreigners as they put trash in the wrong trash cans and depurified the water meant to purify people before they pray at shrines. Thanks to Johnny Hillwalker, we knew better.

After the temple, we took our 3rd bus back to Kyoto station, where we tried for about 45 minutes to get to the south side of it. It seems that no one in kyoto wants to go south of the station - only the north part of the city is important?? We ended up walking the streets in the area until we found one that went over the endless tracks of trains leading into and out of the station. I think we must have walked a mile out of our way.

After much strain and hardship, we found our hotel around 5. We checked in. This was another ryokan but this is a newer-style ryokan, in that the tatami were made out of plastic instead of the normal dried grass. We had a private room in this one, which actually consisted of 2 tatami rooms a toilet room, and a bathroom. It's actually a lot like our rooms at KIT, just newer. We followed the directions of the nice man at the reception desk suggested for Japanese food. It was our first real restaurant in Japan, in that we were shown to our seats by a waiter and waited upon. It was a little pricy but yummy anyway.

Afterwards, we just went back to the ryokan because we didn't dare try and go to the north side of the station and get stuck again. We watched the Haunted Mansion and Anger Management with Japanese subtitles, and basically relaxed and had a relaxing night.

Monday - almost done, I promise

We grabbed breakfast at the combini across the street. (Its a convenience store - basically like the inside of a gas station without the gas and car stuff. They are on every block in Japan.) We then followed the directions of the reception desk man to go under the station to get to the other side. Who would have thought that you need to go to basement 1 (not 2, mind you) from a department store on one side to get to the other side of the station.

We headed to Kyoto tower, because it was the only real plan we had for today. Kyoto tower looks like a spaceship. (Look at a picture of it off of google!) We saw the city and all the places we had visited. It was nice to go there at the end of the trip, so we could retrace our steps and find some of our hotels and such from the tower. I took lots of pictures, and we benched on the floor for a while because there were no benches in the tower. We then wandered around Kyoto station and it's multiple floors and the mall in under the streets to find somewhere to eat.

We finally found someplace that a lot of Japanese were going in and out of. We were looking for cheap Japanese food - so this was a good thing. They were making udon at the front of the shop from scratch. I got udon cause it was the cheapest thing on the menu, and it was super yummy.

We then wandered up the escalators of kyoto station, and ended up at what might have been the 12th floor. It was awesome. That station is amazing! I took bunches more pictures.

We benched around the station for the rest of the time until our bus came to take us back to Kanazawa. We finally got to Kanazawa and finished our expensive weekend by eating some 189 yen ramen.

I've been eating carbs a whole bunch this weekend because everything else was too expensive. I'm glad to be back on campus so I can get lots of cheap college food. Yay! I'm really getting used to living here even though I miss all my friends from Rose. I miss my puppy and pets too but at least I got to pet a doggy at the final ryokan. I'm going to have glasses that are all in one piece again soon - thanks mommy!

Well, I better get to other stuff cause class starts full-off tomorrow! Sorry about the length - I'll try and give you guys a couple of days to catch up.