Kyoto

Friday, June 20th

The train ride from Odawara to Kyoto was green and peaceful, so naturally I napped. There was this cute kid with rolls of chub stomping up and down the aisles near the end; always a nice touch.

We had to transfer a few times within the Kyoto train stations. Usually we use this thing called an IC card to get around, but for the bullet train we had a paper ticket. We just kept inserting the paper ticket in each station until the ticket finally got swallowed. I’m not sure if we cheated Kyoto out of a few yen or what.

The airbnb was spacious enough except in height! I had to bow my head as I walked around, else risk banging into a door frame or a lamp. The door frames were at my eye level!

We were surprisingly tired so we just relaxed near our airbnb. We went to a supermarket and kept bothering the one employee that responded in English since we all had random items we needed to buy (especially Amelia’s color safe shampoo!)

I dragged everyone to an Indian-Nepalese restaurant, expecting a feast of a meal. When I looked at the “set meal” options, none were vegetarian so I asked if I could modify one of them. The waiter was like “yeah chicken tikka” as if it’s vegetarian…. So I gave up and had naan and chole

At least they were playing a lot of songs I recognized! The first song was “say shava shava”, a timeless classic.

Afterwards, we squeezed into a yakitori and had some skewers, edamame, and drinks. There were also sweet potato fries with straight up butter, I didn’t care much for them. But the green onion and mushroom skewers were really tasty!

Nick, Forest and I were sharing a bowl of edamame and we jokingly insisted that each piece we ate was worth 2 or 3 yen depending on the size, so we better keep track, etc.

You probably guessed that we played cards before bed!

Saturday, June 29th

We woke up around 4 am to head over to Fushimi Inari Shrine around sunrise. It was so beautiful, and surprisingly hot. This shrine is known for having supposedly 10,00 gates! Needless to say, we didn’t try to count.

There were very few people, which is what we were going for. There were lots of fox statues though, some of them cutely dressed up!

On the way up, there were lots of mini-shrines with fox statues and miniature gates

Unfortunately, there were lots of mosquitoes and other large insects (moths, spiders) that kept popping up, but FUNfortunately, there were also lots of cats!

There was even a cat that was hunting a snake. I think the snake got away by playing dead (we almost thought it was just some poop coiled up, not a snake!)

Fushimi Inari Shrine was definitely my favorite spot in Kyoto, it’s a MUST!

We took a much needed shower at the airbnb, and then went off for an early lunch in Arashiyama. Nick wanted to go to this beef restaurant to eat Phantom beef (only 80 such beef cows at a time?), so we had to get to the restaurant early to put his name down. I of course was not interested in eating there, but I was interested in this little guy:

Before lunch (the restaurant would only open around 11), we decided to go to the bamboo forest. Before that, we got some soy milk/matcha mix softserve, which was really tasty and had some mochi samples! Kyoto is apparently famous for its mochi. We walked along a riverfront and circled into the bamboo forest.

The place was full of tourists, so we blitzed through

While the others enjoyed a beef-centric lunch,

I went to a nearby vegetarian restaurant for shojin ryori (traditional vegetarian monk food). I had a killer view from my seat!

And the food was really nicely presented as well, even if I barely knew what anything was or how to eat it.

Almost every item had some soy in it, which got a bit repetitive. And there were definitely some items that I thought were desserts (like the little green bowl on the right) that were anything but desserts, unless you consider wasabi sweet.

After meeting up with the others, we went to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji). I distinctly remember that when a stream of people would disembark from the bus, the driver would say “arigato gozaimashita, gozaimashita, gozaimashita, …, gozaimashita ” tacking on a gozaimashita in the same exact tone for each passenger as they tagged off. It was almost mesmerizing. Forest and Amelia had already seen it so Nick and I went in by ourselves.

I think there’s one of Buddha’s relics inside, but I’m not sure. The gold-leaf exterior certainly is remarkable!

There wasn’t much to do here except look at the thing (you can’t enter). I can see why Forest and Amelia wouldn’t visit a second time.

We met up with the others and took a taxi to Kamigamo shrine. I had heard that the two “gamo” shrines (on the same river), Kamigamo and Shimigamo, are must sees. However Kamigamo was a bit of a let down compared to what we had already seen earlier that day.

We tried to catch a bus home, but we honestly couldn’t find the bus stand. Google maps let us down, leading us to phantom stops all over the place. We bought some snacks at a convenience store (well, can you consider a bag of carrots as a snack [unless your name is Cale Horeff]?) and just got a taxi home. We had an early start to the day, so we all napped until evening.

I started reading Red Dwarf, which my dad recommended for me, and it’s so funny in a dry way. As I laughed and laughed I could imagine my dad laughing at the same stupid jokes. Around 8 we ventured out to the Gion district, where there’s a lot of shopping and food.

We went to Ramen Ippudo, which was definitely better than what I’ve had in the US! There was a bit of a wait but the vegan ramen + kaedama (noodle refill) really hit the spot. Nick was overjoyed to finally see me really dig into a meal.

As it rained down on our walk back from a station, I ran into Kimberly, one of my neighbors on the street I grew up on! Like me, she was with 3 other friends on a post-graduation trip. Such a small world!

Sunday, June 30th

We woke up to some really torrential rain. Overall our luck with weather has been really good considering we came to Japan during monsoon season.

We walked over to a vegan cafe where we all had pretty much the same dish: miso soup, salad, and tofu over rice. Nick’s umbrella was stolen, which means that I’m the only one whose umbrella didn’t get jacked (I think Forest’s was stolen in Tokyo or something).

At the station, Nick realized he didn’t have his IC card, so he had to walk back home to get his card. But then he realized I didn’t give him the key either! So I had to run to throw the key to him across the turnstile, and barely ran back to the platform in time to catch the train. The three of us remaining headed over to Nishiki market, which is again in the Gion district.

There was a donut shop, Koe donuts, that lured us in with it’s cute decor and tasty looking pastries.

Nishiki market is basically an alleyway lined with shops with all kind of stuff!

I got some fans and random trinkets to give as gifts to family. After Nick caught up, we went into a mall where I got some origami stuff for my cousin Prajwal, and Nick and Forest once again went on a fruit rampage.

Nick headed back home, melon in hand, and the rest of us went over to Kiyomizu-dera temple. The actual temple was under construction, so we didn’t go inside, but the walk up to it was awesome!

We meandered on back home to meet Nick for dinner. We had trouble actually getting into a restaurant we wanted to eat at, Nick and I suspect it’s because they didn’t want foreigners (which isn’t unheard of). We ended up going to a Chinese restaurant, which had a special vegetarian menu with 2 items on it. We went home and had an early night, we would head off to Osaka early tomorrow morning!