Shinkansen to Kyoto

Greg decided to get up and take pictures early in the morning. He banged around all his camera gear and tripped a few times to make sure I was also awake. While I attempted to get some rest, my body refused to fall back asleep. When he returned, we grabbed some breakfast from the 7-11 down below and decided to head to the train station. We hopped on a Shinkansen to Kyoto and were in a new city hundreds of miles away by 10am. We left our bags at the lobby of our hotel, and went to Fushimi Inari Shrine. You may recognize this better as the place with the rows and rows of red torii gates. Many other people knew this as well. In spite of the selection of pictures I am choosing to display on this blog, it was nearly impossible to get a picture without someone's appendage sneaking into the the frame. We had to be quick.

Note the arm creeping into frame. People really do ruin everything. And yes, I understand I am part of the problem.










We hiked quite a ways up the mountain before electing to turn around. The heat was quite oppressive with humidity to match. The weather patterns in Japan have been very unusual this summer, with a record-breaking heat wave claiming human lives. There are a pair of typhoons moving in on the Japanese mainland bringing unstable tropical air, which has not aided the mugginess. If there is any bright spot, Japan has plenty of vending machines, even at the shrine, so we could try and stay hydrated.

We returned to our hotel to complete check-in. We are staying right at the train station, which is like its very own city. Not only is it the massive above-ground facility you see here, but it extends well under ground with an entire subterranean complex of food stores, restaurants, and shops which ultimately branch under the surrounding streets and connect to other massive department stores and shopping complexes. It's really quite an impressive engineering feat.

We ate at the top of the train station, where we had a sort of katsu chicken and rice dish. The gentleman sitting next to us explained, in detail, how we were eating the dish completely wrong. We were to crush the sesame seeds in a bowl with a special wooden muddler of sorts. Then we were to pour the tonkatsu sauce over the crushed sesame. The rice was to go in its own bowl. Basically, everything was supposed to be separated and organized. I had made the egregious error of wanting to mix everything together like a Hawaiian plate lunch, which brought a bit of a laugh from the gentleman sitting next to us. I wish I had pictures or video of this exchange, but I was too embarrassed -- hiding in shame like a Japanese schoolboy.

After lunch, we took a long walk to Kiyomizu-Dera Temple. You see, while the Kyoto train station is really impressive as a structure, it is a bit lacking in its actual rail network around the city, so I brought Greg, a fragile, and fair-skinned individual on a sort of trail of tears under the afternoon sun.

We never actually went in to the physical temple itself because it was under massive scaffolding and renovation, so we hung out on the outside and awaited sunset from our elevated position on the hillside. Misters spritzed a bit of water from a nearby shelter, but it all seemed to evaporate before reaching my body. As the sun disappeared behind the horizon, Greg and I started walking down the narrow pedestrian streets and encountered another pagoda shortly thereafter.

The pagoda was part of Hokanji Temple, and as we raised our cameras to try and capture it, 20 people in our vicinity decided to stop and do the same thing. Such is life...

We enjoyed our walk through the old areas of the city. Sorry. I enjoyed the walk. Greg was suffering from blisters, and all sorts of ailments. He was limping along behind me like a whale struck by a harpoon. To ensure he didn't end up as sashimi in Tsukiji, I hailed a taxi to take us back to the station.