After Charles' morning caffeine injection we made our way to Shin-Osaka eki to pick up our rail passes and get shinkansen (bullet train) tickets for Kyoto. The guy who helped us was an old hand at the process. He had our passes and tickets ready in no time flat.
When two people get tickets together the normal assumption on the part of the ticket agent is to give seats next to each other. That is not a good thing when both people are the size of Charles and I. Especially with the size of the seats in Japan. We were pressed in tight together.
The ride to Kyoto only takes 15 minutes so we had barely had time to complain about the tight quarters.
Our first stop in Kyoto was the market, Kobo-san. This market is held on the 21st of every month. It has been in operation for about 700 years.
Entering the market we went looking for some food and found a stall selling takoyaki (octopus balls). We had been told to eat takoyaki many times so we each got a 6 pack and sat down to eat. They were good but I felt that bonito flakes were too much.
We went looking for stuff and I bought a kimono for my friend Robin and Charles bought a noren to put over the door to his living room.
After we had seen all the stalls and looked though all the knick-knacks we headed out to find a certain temple that was supposedly having a display of Noh chanting. We went to the area where the temple is and tried to find it. We couldn't find it. Even the locals we asked had never heard of the place. By this time we knew that we had missed the chanting so we went looking for lunch. We tried to find something good that wasn't overly expensive. Unfortunately this was a very touristy area of town so everything was more expensive than normal. We gave up on the search for good and just settled on 'not expensive' and went to KFC. I don't know how it is possible but KFC is even worse in Japan then it is here in Canada.
Our next intended destination in Kyoto was the Taiko Centre. It is a store that sells taiko related stuff. It wasn't very far from where we were so we walked down there. We were greeted by a closed store front. It was a national holiday in Japan that day so most stores were closed and this was no exception. As we stood there cursing our luck we noticed a delivery van making a delivery to the side door of the store. Charles walked over to the people doing the deliver and asked if the store was closed. The answer was affirmative so Charles proceeded to lay it on thick. “We are from Canada and came all this way to come to the store. We can't come back tomorrow because we are leaving.” The woman looked at us and asked what we were looking for. After we told her we just wanted bachi (drum sticks) and such she let us in to look over the merchandise. We bought some bachi and shoes and CDs and such. It was an expensive stop for us.
Our next destination was Otagi Nembutsu Ji. It is not very well known. It has 1200 statues there which are all kinda silly and odd. It's very different from the normal Japanese temple where everything is very serious and sombre.
To get there we had to take a long slow and hot street car ride to the outskirts of town. On the street car there was a guy who kept clapping in front of his mouth. His mouth made the clapping sound really weird. Neither of us could do it right when we tried it. We then had to walk through a bamboo forest and a very up-scale touristy area filled with expensive shops.
The walk was mostly uphill. We came to a place called Nembutsu Ji so we paid 500¥ to get in. The place was just a big grave yard. We were confused. We asked at the ticket gate where Otagi Nembutsuji is and they pointed up the hill.
The steepness of the climb was increasing as we went higher. We were starting to get annoyed at whomever decided that the tops of big hills was a good place to put a temple.
We found the place eventually and went in. There were very few people there. The place is not very well known even among Japanese people (we met some locals who had never heard of the place). We spent the next little while looking at all the statues and exploring the area. We had the place almost to ourselves. There was a family looking around and some people washing the temple but that was it. We took lots of pictures of statues we found interesting or funny.
Eventually we had seen all we needed to see and went out of the temple. There was a bus stop across the street so we went to wait for the bus. A local walked past so we asked him when the bus came and he said it would be there in about 45 minutes. Our feet were killing us but we decided to walk back down to the street car. On our way back we passed a rickshaw with two geishas sitting in the back. Those were the only geishas we saw on the whole trip.
When we got back to Kyoto station we took time to explore the station itself. The building is really cool. It's about 10 stories tall and open concept. We took escalators up to the roof top and looked out over Kyoto. It was a very nice view.
I'm told that Godzilla destroyed this building once. They Japanese are very good at rebuilding after Gozilla related incidents. They have had a lot of practice.
We grabbed dinner at a restaurant in the underground mall at the station. It was OK but not very remarkable. The most interesting part was getting the panties shot. It was taken surreptitiously while the waitress was taking our orders.
We went down to Osaka and went straight to the hotel. Our feet were telling us that they planned to make our lives miserable if we persisted with this silly walking idea of ours.
We slept soundly that night.
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