Kyoto Goodness

Well I am back from the holiday of no end. I'll give you the quick low down so we can get to the pictures before you get too bored.

Monday:

We saw Kinkakuji, Ryoanji and Kiyomizu temple. Kinkakuji is this golden plated temple. Ryoanji is a really famous zen garden with 15 rocks you can never see all at once from one angle. And Kiyomizu-dera is a temple on the side of the hill. We hit that one up right at dusk so it was really pretty. On monday we decided to try the 500 yen bus pass which would let you use certain buses all day. Not only are Kyoto buses really really confusing, but they are owned by more than one company. And some companies don't acknowledge the all day pass thing. It would be pretty easy to put a sign on the door that says "we don't use the all day card" but no. They don't. I'm all for monopolies of public transporation when ridiculous things like that end up costing me several hundred yen because there are 3000 different bus companies for one city.

Tuesday:

I went to Universal Studios Japan in Osaka. It was pretty much exactly like the american one but few rides and everything in Japanese. I think the Japanese would have a heart attack if they went on an actual ride. It was really funny to see E.T. and the terminator speak in Japanese. The best though was at the Jaws ride, our boat capitan had to shoot the shark and was really excited and Japanese about the whole thing. It was like the shark was a cuddly dog. All in all a good time.

Wednesday:

After a long discussion about the day it finally became aware we should split up to do what we wanted instead of being dragged along with everyone else. So at first we went to Fushimi Inari temple. Bascially it's thousands of torii's (red shinto gates). With foxes all around. The signs said there were monkeys but I never saw any. Then Holly and I decided to go to the Suntory brewery which makes "Suntory Malts". It was one of the highlights of the trip. The whole tour was all in Japanese but it still was pretty interesting and I caught quite a lot of what she was talking about. At the end of the tour they put our group in this really nice guest hall and gave us all free beer. Most of the business aged men were basically just standing in line to get the most free beer possible. Kind of funny because the bathroom was filled with old women and business men drunk. After the brewery bascially we waited around kyoto station for several hours until 10:50 pm when our bus left. I am telling you, if hell has a bus service I probably just rode it. The seats were so uncomfortable and it felt like riding in an oven with the heat all the way up. I was so glad to get out of that thing. And then when I was giving my ticket to the bus driver I dropped my free souvenir glass I got from the brewery and being mad I just threw it away, not realizing my ipod was in that bag. Luckily I figured it out a couple minutes later.

All in all, the trip was good. But words of advice: don't travel in a group with 5 women and never take the New Dream JR Highway bus from Shinjuku.


In front of Toji temple.


At this costume museum we went to and had all these dolls dressed up. It was pretty impressive.


At the river bank, hawks were attacking children.


At the monkey mountain. Holly, Rachel and I with a monkey. notice how far away we are because we are afraid it will attack us. haha.


Rachel and I mimicking the monkeys.


More monkeys with a view of Kyoto at the back


The sign in front of Nijo Castle.


One of the entrances of the castle.


Kinkakuji


Kinkakuji plus Daniel, Cindy, Rachel and Nicole.


Ryoanji zen garden. It was hard to fit this in a picture.


At Ryoanji, a lake in the middle with a tree almost falling out in the lake. Quite picturesque.


At the beginning of Kiyomizudera.


Looking off Kiyomizudera at dusk.


At fushimi Inari in one of the tons of successions of torii's.


I wasn't kidding about there being a lot of torii's.


A bigger torii.


The giant christmas tree in Kyoto station.

That is a summary of everything major. The pictures really are like 1/1000th of the intial beauty. Sigh.


Sayonara Kyoto...

Monkey day

Today we got up to head up to Arashiyama mountain to see the monkeys. We took the train to the station at arashiyama and attempted to find our way to the place where you can feed the monkeys. Luckily we saw lots of signs for "モンキーパーク"(monkii paaku) the monkey park. The city of arashiyama is right below one of the mountains on the edge of Kyoto. It is quite pretty. Especially with all the leaves changing. We had to take quite a hike up the mountain to see these monkeys. It was worth every yen. I mean how often do you get to feed monkeys. Or play with them. Definately would be illegal in US thanks to lawsuits. The monkeys are the Japanese monkey kind, not sure the actual name. They were really funny. The staff gave us handouts saying not to feed the monkeys in certain places and not to stare the monkeys in the eye. Every now and then the monkeys would start fighting and run around. I kept on thinking of the movie Congo and how the monkeys would attack me if I stared at them. We took a bunch of pictures with the monkeys and they look really funny because we are standing so far away from the monkeys in fear. When we fed the monkeys I got freaked out because their hands and eyes are so human like. When they grabbed the food from our hands it was like a little person was touching us. Anyway, so after monkey goodness we headed back down the mountain. There were a lot of shops and places on the way back to the station so we stopped in a few of those. The guidebook had told me that this arashiyama place was not so crowded because it was farther away from Tokyo. Lies. It was really really crowded.

So we headed back to Nijojo station. Thanks to Kyoto's crappy trains you can't really ride far on them without transfering to another line. So we decided we would go to Nijojo castle while we were there. Before that I went to a eating place inside a sort of mall and they were playing all sorts of christmas songs including feliz navidad. So after lunch we went to the castle. It's this huge castle that some sort of Shogun lived in for a while. Who knows, they never really tell you. This is Japan, they don't tell you anything. And what they do tell you are lies. The castle was really neat though, there are all sorts of gardens all around. Really beautiful with the leaves changing colours.

After the castle we thought we would walk down to central Kyoto and do some looking about. Then we met up with the other girls and ended up eating at this crappy Japanese restaraunt that gets my seal of dissproval. Watami. They ignored us for like an hour and they ended up charging us for a "service charge". Apparently this is because they give you "complimentary" pieces of lettauce and one slice of carrot. After the restaraunt I decided to walk home instead of the metro because I wanted to see more of the city. It was a nice 45-one hour walk. Kyoto and Tokyo are two different places indeed. Kyoto has so much room. The sidewalks weren't crammed with people everywhere you go. It is very nice. You can also see more than one star here. The whole spirit of Kyoto seems so much more relaxed than Tokyo. As obvious by the lateness of the public transportation.

I forgot to add I think that the sheets we have in the hostel are leopard or dalmation print.

Kyoto, day sort of one

Where to start, we took the new dream bus from shinjuku last night at 10 30 pm. The bus situation in tokyo is well...a lot different from the trains. They aren't on time or really well organized. In fact, the station for the bus was really hard to find. Barely any of the directions were in english but thanks to my crappy Japanese we figured it out. So we get on this bus about 20 minutes late. The bus is 3 persons wide, and each person has a seperate seat so lots of room I thought. We were all seated in the front of the bus so it felt like we were the welcome squad for the bus riders. Rachel sat in the very front middle seat and it looked like a roller coaster ride because she had a bar to hold onto. So after a short wait, we get on our way. In typical Japanese fashion, there is cute music and an introduction saying things like welcome on the bus have a good ride and some of the rules of the bus, about 10 minutes long. Then all they said in english was (in really slow english) "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the new dream bus from shinjuku station to Kyoto station. Please fasten your seatbelts". After about an hour the bus heats up quite a lot thanks to the heater below each of our seats. I mean boiling your feet hot. Then we stopped at a Japanese truck stop. It was so neat and tidy with a cute little convienience store there. After about an hour more of the train heating up, Erin asks me very desperately to ask the driver to turn off the heat. So after a while of trying to figure out how it would be appropriate to ask the driver (there was a sign saying that because of terrorists and bus jackers, please do not wait near the driver) but I finally did and we had a very Japanese conversation and they stopped baking us. We ended up getting there about 6:10 am this morning. And since no places were open, we sat around and attempted to plan out a day.

More funny things about the bus though, each of the seats had individual reading lights. But they were located at about your knee and were pretty much impossible to read by. I was traveling with all girls and often erupted in late night laughter that I think disturbed the other passengers. For about 2-3 hours after we left tokyo the bus would stop at random stops and open the door and then go. We thought it might be tolls, but when I looked outside the bus there was no toll station around. Pretty sketch. At the bottom of our seat we had a little stool like thing attached to the floor that was really unneccesary and made things kind of uncomfortable.

Onto the day. First we got some coffee at a local chain place here. I immediately noticed the size of the cafe. Pretty much the size of what I would expect a cafe to be. Not incredibly small and cramped. I could tell I was out of Tokyo. Along the day I noticed lots of things that were a lot bigger than tokyo sized. After the cafe we went to Toji temple. A nice little temple. Than we wandered around and decided we should probably try to check into our hostel since we weren't sure where it was. So we boarded the JR train to the station nearest our hostel. (JR, Japan Railways, is one of the big train companies here). Let's just say kyoto trains are a bit different from Tokyo trains. Even though they do have a few rails here, there aren't as many trains that run an hour as Tokyo. In Tokyo there is normally a train at least every 5 minutes, usually sooner. But here it is more like every 20 minutes. So after waiting and finally getting to our stop, we figure out how to get to the hostel. The hostel website had claimed they spoke english, lies. But I could understand quite fine anyway, but still.

After finding the hostel, Rachel and Hollie wanted to be made up like Maiko. Maiko is like an apprentince to Geisha. Geisha being the lady of the arts, not a prostitute like some think. It ended up taking them like 2 hours so I wandered around Gion for a bit. There is a big river next to Gion so I was walking down there and I saw like 15 Hawks all flying about. And there were two kids trying to feed them and the hawks were just diving down and scaring the kids. The only wild life in Tokyo is ravens so this was exciting.

After they got done with the Maiko stuff, we had to go back to the hostel to figure out where exactly we were staying. Because we had chekced in early.We were in this random building that you take the elevator to the fifth floor and here you are. There are just a lot of bunk beds in here and a big kitchen and showers and stuff. I'm typing this this morning and there aer only like 4-5 other guys here and about 30 Japanese girls. Quite the interesting place.

So then long story short, we met some people. Went to dinner. Then went to this English pub. This really creepy old Japanese buisnessman wouldn't leave me alone. He kept on offering to buy me drinks. Creepy. Came back to the hostel. And here I am.