It is Sarah back writing the blog today. Alan has taken himself in for a shower and as it is already late, if I leave it to him, it will be 2am before we get any sleep. I may take a while, but at least my blogs are entertaining. He will comment in red. I don’t need him to write in any other colour.
This morning we left the sleepy little town of Hakone-Yumoto, a bit sad. It has been so nice and quiet. We made our way back to Odawara Station and then on the Shinkansen for 2 hours to Kyoto. We sure are getting used to riding on trains. I can’t see us continuing this back in Sydney though. Where we were the only westerners in Hakone-Yumoto, Kyoto station was filled with them. We hardly saw a Japanese person.
A few days ago I changed where we would be staying in Kyoto. Osaka relied mainly on the JR (Japan Rail) system, Tokyo had some JR lines but mainly subway stations but here in Kyoto there are very few JR lines and only two main subway lines. Instead of relying on the expensive subway, especially as we have our JR rail tickets, we moved to a hotel close to Kyoto Station. I usually have thoroughly scrutinised the hotels but I only had about 20 minutes to do it the other morning before we left Tokyo so I really wasn’t sure what to expect. It is a 15 minute walk to the station which is fine, the pillows are nice but the beds are terribly hard. We’ll learn to live with them. It doesn’t worry me at all, I can sleep on anything.
After checking into the hotel we spent the afternoon lying around and watching stuff we bought with us. At about 6.20pm we left the hotel in search of food. We had a map given to us by Information at the station and we very quickly learned that it is nowhere near to scale. We took a walk to the Gion district famous for its Geishas and supposedly restaurants. After just over an hour of walking we arrived. Thankfully it is a very mild night. We did see two Geishas but were unable to get the camera out fast enough to get a photo.
We took a walk around the Yasaka-jinja Shrine which as all lit up. We then walked the Gion Shopping Street which was packed. We took a side street and realised we had found ourselves amongst all the girly shows and seedy bars and clubs. Just as we were about to give up and head back to McDonalds, we found a little Italian restaurant. The food portions were small but it was enough to make us feel like we weren’t going to die of starvation. They were small but still pretty good.
We took a different route back to the hotel which was a lot quieter and only took us just on 50 minutes to get here. It’s much better when we have a set target to aim for rather than just wandering the streets aimlessly looking for something edible.
Tomorrow we will look at the map and try and work out how best to get around this city.
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