Weekend Trip #1: Kyoto!!!

August 26th

Hello World!!!

So I’m in my living room right now. Doing the crazy multi-tasking things I do. I’m writing this blog on my computer, watching Resident Evil: Extinction (thank you Stino!) and online waiting to see if anybody will go online. It’s quite unusual at this hour because although it just became 11 pm, it’s like 7 am for almost everyone else. Hey…we’re actually on the same day! Tuesday! ;P

Anyhoo. This blog will be about my weekend. And being that my weekend was jammed packed with excitement, surprises, action and the ever lovable randomness, this may be a long blog…so…just giving you all a heads up!

So, if my memory serves me right, on Thursday, one of my awesome neighbors invited me to a trip to Kyoto! Being that it is one of the cities that I want to visit while I’m in Japan (even if traveling in Japan is apparently expensive) I went for it.

So the group consisted of other JETs. 2 of which live in my jutaku and one that lives in a neighboring jutaku (and since he’s the only JET in that jutaku that renewed his contract, he’s thinking about moving to our jutaku). So Friday night I’m packing and trying to do some socializing via aim and skype. Since it was Friday night for me, I didn’t care too much if I stayed up really late. So I tried to wait ‘til my sister got to work so that I could e-mail her. Sadly though, she never responded ‘til most likely after I went to bed. So I went to bed like at 1 in the morning and pretty much just took a nap…because I had to meet everyone else at 5:30 am!!!

So…as hard as it was to get up, I managed to eat something and get ready to go. Grace, Carl and I took a taxi to the train station where we rode the JR to Hakata station. At the first stop on the JR, our other traveling buddy, Emmett, joined.

At Hakata, we went on the shinkansen (or “bullet train”) and in about 2 and half or 3 hours we arrived in Kyoto. I was only awake for like…half an hour to an hour and slept the rest of the way. But it wasn’t all that comfortable. Though there was room and the seat could recline pretty far back, I kept lolling to the sides…and I think I almost fell off it at one point…

Anyway, so as soon as we arrived, we headed towards our hotel where we left our over-night bags in the cloak room and then went off back to the station to meet up with Grace’s friend, Jamie. (she’s basically the reason why Grace decided to travel up to Kyoto).

After that, we started our sight-seeing adventure. The first place we went to was Nijo-jo. It’s one of the famous castles that has 2 motes! I think I went the most trigger happy at this place…guess I was really excited to be in Kyoto.

At this place, you have to take your shoes off to enter into the castle. But what was interesting is the way the floor was constructed. It was made to mimic the sound of the nightingales so some funny architecture with nails created really squeaky floor boards. But…it’s not a bad squeaky…just…very very squeaky. Although because there’s so many people around, it’s rather hard to tell if it’s really your steps that are causing the noise or not…

Unfortunately, there were many signs constantly reminding people that photography and video taping are prohibited. …of course I read that after I tried to record the sound… ;P

After this, we went to Kinkakujo, or the Golden Temple (?). [the question mark is because there is a difference between shrines and temples…but I don’t know it too well…] Anyway, this is also a very famous area. And it has a rooster on top of the temple! Oh, and there’s little shops to buy good luck charms and omiyage and other little trinkets. But we went into the tea house! Grace thinks that because it’s summer, they served iced green tea instead of the tradition hot green tea. In any case, it was refreshing and delicious. And we got a cookie too. It had an interesting slightly sour middle…

After that…I think we rode the bus back to the hotel. We split up for a bit and re-met for kaiten sushi dinner, or conveyer belt sushi! The cool thing was that this place had lots of variety and even the California roll! Yum!!!

Afterwards, we walked around the area and looked at shops and eventually ended up in Gion, where Geisha and Maiko (geisha apprentice) are known to be. But because we were there “after hours,” we didn’t see any. But we did go check out the shrine that’s near Gion. It was really nice how the lanterns changed how the look of the shrine.

Then…I believe we called it a night. We caught a late night snack and headed back to the hotel (though Jamie took a bus back to her hotel/hostel). Then I took a nice warm shower (because it’s been hot, I’ve been taking cold showers and moreover because I can’t work the water heater, I’ve been taking cold showers) and then knocked out.

Again, we woke up rather early (not as early though) to meet Jamie at the station. But also, my home boy Terence found out that I was going to be in the Kyoto area (thank you facebook) and e-mailed my phone which lead to our arrangement to meet at the Kyoto station too!

It was awesome getting to see a really close friend again, rather than just exchanging email or instant messaging. It carried the feeling of meeting up with family which was great to fight my current battle with homesickness and culture shock (though it has gotten much much better).

So right after we found Terence at the station, we all headed off for the Fushimi Inari Shrine. It’s a fox shrine so there’s many different fox statues all about the area. Also, this is the shrine that has many many red gates. All, I believe Grace said, have been donated by someone or some organization/company. So…in one direction, the gates all look red, but then you look at them from the other side and you see all this crazy writing! But I really liked how after some red gates, a stone one would become visible. I think some of the stone gates have been standing since the Meiji era!

Because the pathway around this shrine is really long (and we were still a little tired from all the walking from the previous day), we only walked part of it. But enough to get attacked by mosquitos!!! ><”

Then after this…we went to Kiyomizu Tera (temple). But to get to the temple, we had to walk up an up hill road. And being it was a sunny day, it got pretty hot. And there were so many other people walking up too! Once we were really close to the top, I got excited because I saw some Maiko…but only to be told that they were fake maiko. Around the area, there are places that dress you up like a Maiko and you can go about the city in the costume. So…that was who I saw. But man…I’m surprised they were able to walk in those crazy high sandals…and even downhill too!

So up we went into the temple (and at some points, even more up we went). But the view from there was awesome! So much greenery and then nice shots of the city. It was just beautiful.

And there was this shop around the area that sold sweets that are only made/sold in Kyoto. It’s basically mochi (the rice dough thing. Not the mochi ice cream balls) but in Kyoto it’s much thinner. And there were so many different flavors too! The awesome thing about this shop is that there are many free samples. So…really you can just go in and eat…and pretend you’re interested in buying… Besides, it’s so busy in there, it’s not like they’ll really be able to tell you’re just eating the sweets as long as you look interested… ;P Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just eat some of the samples. I bought a box of what I think was plain (though it had a cinnamon-y taste) and green tea flavors for the office (doing the omiyage thing again).

Oh right. Sometime on Saturday (I can’t really recall when that day since I’m finishing this today…Thursday…) but we found this nice trendy store. There were so many nice things in there (but a little pricy…which was great because then I didn’t spend too much). But I did find an awesome belt! Two actually and I was having a difficult time choosing between the two. But luckily I tried them on then and there and found that only one fit me so the awesome teal one I bought. Can’t wait to wear it really…rather bummed my favorite jeans are back at home…ah well. I’ll just go buy a new pair. Can’t have too many pairs of jeans, ne? ;P

Let’s see…so after the Kiyomizu Tera, we hopped onto a bus and headed for Sanjyusangendo…only to find out we were 5 minutes late for the cut off point to buy tickets and enter… ><”
The real sad thing was that Emmett really wanted to visit this area and we just missed the chance… D’oh!

After some sitting and chatting, we decided to head back to Gion. We actually walked into the area this time but alas, still no Geisha or Maiko (though there was a group of photographers around…). And then we went into the shopping area again. Terence found a manga/figurine store which I had somehow managed to miss and oh man…it was so hard to resist. The prices though, made it a little easier to resist (quite expensive compared to how much I can pay for some of them at the Anime Expo or Little Tokyo…sometimes…) But I gotta say, they did look better than some of ones that get sold in the states…

And then, we all squished into a bus and went back to the train station. We helped Terence buy his tickets and find his way back. Then the rest of us went to the lockers to get our overnight bags and headed down to the Shinkansen waiting area…only to read that ALL the skinkansen were running an hour and a half late!!! Though it was beautiful and sunny in Kyoto, there was crazy rain going on in Fukushima I believe (where all the shinkansen were coming from).

So instead of waiting about for more than an hour, we boarded onto a different shinkansen. We had to ride in the unreserved seating cabin though…so yay, more standing… But once we boarded the second one (we had to do a transfer), we all managed to find seats after the second stop. And more sleeping followed.

Another awesome Jutaku neighbor was nice enough to pick us up from the JR station and we safely made it home. Interestingly, our original shinkansen that was running 90 minutes late ended up being canceled. o_O;

So…that was my crazy weekend. I’m pretty sure I left out some things but over the process of days, I forgot to write about some or think I have written about…may even have written some of it twice…and I’ll try to post up some photos of it here. Otherwise, most, if not all, will up on my flickr account.