Day 7 - Kyoto on a Friday night

-- Back dated due to lack of wireless at ryokan. Finally found wireless at MacLaughlin's Irish pub which has free wireless while serving 15% barley wine --

It’s Saturday morning at 10:30am and I just woke up from a nap. Yes, your calculations are correct. I’ve already taken and woken up from a nap before 10:30 in the morning. That’s what a Japanese ryokan will do to you.

A ryokan is a traditional Japanese house in which you can rent a room to stay. Sometimes it’s strictly a business, but in other cases like ours, families rent rooms to travelers. The room is quite large, and during the day is just an empty space carpeted with bamboo mats. At night, you lay out futon mats and the cushiest duvet blankets I’ve ever been wrapped in. Very simple, but oh so comfortable.

Yesterday, Tania and I checked out of the hotel and spent a few hours doing laundry, and packing a bag of excess clothes and items to mail back to the US. We simply had too many items to lug between cities and countries, so we shed ourselves of the obviously unnecessary items. While Tania finished the laundry, I headed over to the post office to mail back this bag. I had 5 different mailing options, ranging from overnight air to 1-3 month cargo ship. Let’s just say that the overnight option to mail a 8 lb bag was quite expensive, so my brother should be expecting a package somewhere around, oh, February, if it ever gets there at all.

After the laundry was done and we finished some mystery meat sandwiches (good mystery meat since we’re in Japan. I have a feeling the bad mystery meat will start coming our way in China and beyond.), we sprinted to Shinjuku station, I with the world’s largest and most overpacked travel backpack on my back (yes, it was busy back there with the pack and my big Polish ass, you jerks) and a large Yahoo backpack on my chest, and Tania with an equally stuffed roller bag running beside me. We then connected over to Tokyo station to catch a high-speed train to Kyoto. Boy is that the way to travel.

We had soooo much space around us to set our bags and stretch our legs. And the train, boy is it fast. I’m guessing that we were humming along the Japanese countryside at around 130 mph, with the smoothest ride imaginable. Before Tania could have another day dream about Edward Collins (thanks Rox for getting her addicted to Twilight. I swear she wishes he were on this trip with her instead of me.), we were in Kyoto. We did the mandatory “getting lost looking for the tourist information office which was hidden in the 9th floor of a train station department store” thing before catching a subway ride up to Kitayama where our ryokan is.

Kitayama is at the northern edge of Kyoto, which is quite out of the way of all the popular areas of town, but since the leaves are changing and it’s quite possibly the busiest weekend of the year, there was only one other option for housing, and it wasn’t cheap, so we opted for the “out of the way yet won’t break the bank” option, which I’m glad we did.

We’re actually the first guests to stay in this very old house that was recently purchased by a couple named John and Acco. She is from southern Japan and he is from Chicago. She plays the mandolin and he sings, which I assume is the reason they got to come together; music that is, just like Tania and me, even though I can’t sing for crap.

After chatting with Acco for a bit, Tania settled into the room while I walked down the street to the world’s most expensive grocery store. I blew $40 on some fruit, crackers, and individual cans of weird alcohol to get us revved up for a crazy night on the town (if you knew Kyoto, you’d know I was being a tad sarcastic right there).

We hurried to Misoka-an Kawamichiya, a noodle shop which opened in 1710. They’ve definitely mastered the art of the soba noodle over the last 300 years. Tania had the herring in soba noodles which was beyond words, and I had my soba noodles with egg, chicken, and onions. Hot damn was it good!!

We strolled through the Abbot Kinney-type boutique streets and into the old-town Vegas covered shopping streets until we hit the river, which had kids hanging out in groups just like we used to during the hotter months in Sevilla (what up Steph and Spen??!!!). There was even a guy swinging fire ropes around. It was right around this time that Tania and I exclaimed that Kyoto was the greatest city in the world. She felt a little bit of Austria in the area, too, which made it even sweeter for her.

Needing what international travelers do every now and then, we stopped by Mclaughlin’s, an Irish pub. Thinking there would be people of all types with their arms around each other’s shoulders singing drinking songs, we instead walked into an Oxford University Press party. These were the dullest people this side of the Pacific, to say the least. Tania and I resorted to making up drinking games to entertain each other. One game involved having to make up and remember a sequence of odd hand maneuvers. The other game was a takeoff of Tania’s favorite game Dancefloor, but instead of having to dance up on someone, you had to get up on one of the Oxfords and talk about a specific subject. Instead of talking to the first subject about Obama’s foreign relation policy with the East, Tania was able to grab some drink tickets from the man who made Tammy Bahama shirts look even worse (sorry Dad). Free drinks!

We enjoyed the drinks with two Ausies named Emma and Steve, and then headed home. All in all, Kyoto is an incredible city that we haven’t even gotten to know yet, so we’re off right now to start checking off some of the 800 temples we want to see.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!