It’s a day of lists.
We’re in Tokyo to:
- Visit my next door neighbor’s kid, who has an internship this term in Tokyo.
- Allow my neighbor to train at the main Aikido dojo as he’s a second or third degree black belt and that was on his bucket list.
I tried to tell them that visiting Kyoto was bad, but they insisted so we took a day trip with an overnight in Osaka. I am not a fan of Kyoto and I have a bunch of reasons.
- It’s always crowded and full of Europeans. I have enough on my hands being racist about other Asians and I don’t want to have to hate a bunch of Europeans too.
- My dislike of Kyoto may be passed down from my father because he was married to a woman from Kyoto for two whole weeks. I guess she kicked him out and he had to pay a lot to get an international divorce.
Turns out many of my fears were for nothing – it’s an odd dead period between sakura season and Golden week and one taxi driver said there’s 10% of the crowds that are usually here. My cousin said, “There’s so many foreigners here,” which is true but it really seems that way because all of the in-country tourists are staying home before the big vacation week (Golden week). The roads were oddly clear and even though my traveling companions were saying it’s crowded, it wasn’t nearly as crowded as I remember. At least the hotel prices are back to normal. I heard during sakura season they raised the prices to 6x the normal rate.
The day started off swimmingly. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep (jet lag still) and we made it to the shinkansen station early and my buddy’s kid said she was going to miss the train. Her subway would put her in the station at 8:15, our shinkansen left at 8:18, and she missed two trains because they were overfull. We would probably have to change the tickets so we waited for her downstairs from the actual tracks. Somehow she ran by us without our noticing and got on the correct train without telling us she was even on the way. So we had to make a mad scramble for a later train, find the train conductor, and hope we could get seats. After all that we were only about 10 minutes late to Kyoto. On the train they just scribbled new seat numbers on our tickets.
Not many pictures from me because, well, it’s Kyoto and plenty of people have pictures of Kyoto. We went to Fushimi Inari, Kiyomizu Temple, and Nishiki market and then took the train to Osaka and stayed near Dotombori. We went to dinner at Kura Sushi which was the WORST sushi I’ve had in a long time. Absolute trash. Absolutely avoid.
And that’s the day. Oh, I did get a partial picture of our snacks at Nishiki market:
