Kyoto - onegaishimasu
Mood:  bright
Tuesday, Dec. 23rd
It's a holiday, the Emperor's birthday so....here we are, again, in Kyoto. I slept in this morning and had a much needed 10+ hour's sleep. I met Ildiko and Wayne at the train station at 1pm and headed out to meet Miki and her husband, Atsuo, in Kyoto. Miki is a wonderful woman friend of Ildiko's. Miki is an English translator and her husband is a semi-conductor engineer for Panasonic here in Japan. They were delightful guides today. We had lunch at a Soba restaurant, and I had soba sushi for the first time. Instead of rice in the sushi roll, there are strands of soba noodles rolled up lengthwise inside the seaweed. When the sushi is sliced it looks like little miniature logs sticking out around the delicacies inside the roll. I think that I like the rice sushi better because it sticks together and doesn't fall apart as bad. We took taxis to Kiyomizu shrine and spent a leisurely afternoon browsing the shops on the way up to the temple. We fawned over gorgeous pottery, fans, and other crafts as well as some wonderful confectionaries. We had frequent "candy breaks" thanks to Wayne's unending sweet tooth. At the Shinto shrine at the top of the street, there are many things that you can do to bring you and yours some good luck. There are charms that you can purchase for about $5-10 that will cover anything from love, to good health, to traffic safety. There are special Buddha's on the grounds that get their bellies and heads and legs rubbed a lot for good luck and granting wishes. You can also purchase your fortune. If it's good, please keep the fortune. If it's not so good, like mine, please tie it to the branch of a tree and the gods will, hopefully, work on turning your fortune around! There are two big stones at either end of a long walkway and if your boyfriend can navigate successfully with his eyes closed from stone to stone, he will be totally in love and faithful to you forever. We saw many girls helping their boyfriends navigate by talking to them and steering them to the second stone (somehow I think giving them verbal directions is cheating tee hee).

This is the place that has 3 springs. If you drink from each one they will bring health, wealth and happiness to you.

We timed it just right so we caught the sunset from the temple. The temple has a rather big porch area that people here call a "stage." It is very hilly here and the "stage" drops off to a cliff below and it's QIUTE a drop. The locals have a saying "It's like jumping off the Kiyomizu stage!" This means that you've done something very daring or difficult. Well, I guess I've had a few jumps from the stage then. After the temple, we wandered on down the hill for one last look at the shops that were quickly closing. Everything seems to close up fairly early. Maybe it is due to being rather chilly after the sun goes down.

We catch another taxi to JR station and take Wayne and Ildiko up the escalators to the top of the station. From the top, we have a 360 degree view of the city. We all have a laugh because the Kyoto Tower is right there in front of us every time we turn around. Its reflection in the windows around us makes it look like it is in every single direction in the city. Wayne is a real comedian I'm discovering and we seem to be constantly laughing at his jokes and funny stories. He's quite the entertainer. After a lovely dinner at a "unagi" restaurant (that's eel in English), we hop back on the JR train bound for Nishinomiya.

So we are having such a wonderful time talking on the train that the time just flies by. We are supposed to change trains in Umeda so that we can end up at the Hankyu station close by my apartment but before we know it we hear the announcer say "Sannomiya." We are all a bit slow this late at night and it doesn't register till we are rolling again that we have overshot past Nishinomiya and are headed out on the other side of town. Oh, dear. This is a Super Express train and it makes very few stops so we anxiously sit and wait and hope that it stops before we end up in South America! Finally the doors open and we hop out and head back in the other direction. We are a bit nervous now about missing the stop again and ending up back in Kyoto. Luckily we find the stop in Sannomiya and afer paying a substantial penalty for overshooting our mark, we find the correct train and platform and are back home about an hour later than we thought (11pm yawn). Oh, well, sumimasen. A rather funny and harmless way to end an almost perfect day.


Later I discover that this Super Express train doesn't stop in Umeda or Nishinomiya - so that's why we never heard the stops announced! oops.
Photos!