From the moment we woke up, day four seemed as though it was doomed to be our first slow day of the trip. We took ages to actually crawl out of bed, spending most of the early morning laughing at silly Japanese kid’s TV shows before Nat and Sally went to breakfast without me, as I woke up feeling somewhat sick. I felt a little better after a shower and so we were ready to head out by the time they had come back from eating in the hotel restaurant for free, as it was a complimentary part of our accommodation.




The view from my bed in our Kyoto hotel.

Our first stop after leaving the hotel was the convenience store on the corner for, you guessed it, coffee and a pastry of sorts for me to eat for breakfast. We then crossed the road to go and explore the Yasaka Shrine and Maruyama Park, which were both literally around the corner from our hotel. Surprisingly we spent most of the day there, taking a long walk through most of the gardens that crept higher and higher up the mountain. We only stopped when it appeared as though we had to pass through a graveyard to go any further, and since we were a little uncomfortable with the idea of gawking at people’s graves, we turned around and headed back down the mountain, buying tacky little souvenirs from the various little vendors and markets scattered throughout the shrine and park.




Random painting that we saw along the main street. It’s apparently of the four gods of the North, South, East and West and was painted by a high-school student.




Yasaka Shrine.
















Sally & Nat in front of one of the building things.

























Ninja-photography of Sally & Nat!




And now Nat being ninja-like and sneaking into my photo.



















Ducks in a pond~







Who are these two lunatics again?
















Preparing to do something stupid...




AND JUMP!










We were amused that Sally blended in with the trees.







Statue of some guys that I couldn’t read about because the sign was in Japanese.




And amongst all this beauty is a vending machine.




Further up the mountain where we didn’t go because of the graveyard.







Token shot of everyone’s shoes. Mine are the black converse, Sally’s the plaid and Nat has the Creepers.




Lookit the canopy of leaves~




I am made of win for this picture.










Standing on stepping-stones.




OMG IT’S ME!!1! How did that get there?







Random American busker and the high-school girl that started singing with him.




And then stole his hat.

We stopped briefly back at our hotel to dump our purchases back in our suitcases before heading out again, though this time in the completely opposite direction. We walked back down the main street of Gion, over the river, past the train station we’d come out of the night before and a couple of blocks further down into the main shopping/entertainment district of the area… or at least that’s what we’re assuming it was given all the shops, department stores and restaurants there was around. We ended up ducking into an open-air mall of sorts and spent hours exploring the shops littered throughout the main level and upper levels of some of the buildings.




View down the main street of Gion.




Random alley.




Random water-way near the station entrance.




Ice-cream vending machine!!




Okay, so it’s a whole street of vending machines…




What to choose, what to choose…




EPIC ICE-CREAM SUNDAE!




D.Gray-man section of ANIMATE... and Nat clearly fawning.




You’ll be seeing a lot of this hat in future photos.




And surprisingly I didn’t buy it…





The open-air mall… and Sally’s head.


Naturally, lots of shopping was done in this area... and yet despite the large amounts of money spent and how tired we had become from all the walking, it was a really great afternoon. In the end, we parked ourselves in a KFC for a quick bite to eat (we’d somehow skipped lunch) and a bit of a rest before taking a rather long walk back to the hotel, made longer by the fact we had to detour into a department store to see if we could find an adaptor for all our power cords, followed by another detour to a camera store to find one when the sales assistant in the electronics section of said department store explained he didn’t have any adaptors but gave us a map to a store that did, which was nice of him.




All shopped out and hungry.




KFC ftw.




Teddy bear tower!




Walking back over the bridge to Gion.




And that would be Gion you’re looking at.




And if you’ve read Memoirs of a Geisha, that would be the red-light district side of the river.


Back in our hotel, we completely collapsed and spent the next hour or so comparing purchases, reading all the D.Gray-man doujinshi that Nat had bought and just generally resting our weary feet in wait for Sally’s friend Aki (met on a school exchange years and years ago) to meet us at our hotel so we could go out to dinner with her. She travelled all the way from Nara to get to Kyoto to see us, which was really nice of her! But at the same time it made her a little bit late and we were almost ready to give up on her coming when we received a call from reception telling us she was here.

A brief panic attack from me in regards to the whereabouts of my wallet later, we were ready to set out once again and walked all the way back to the area we had gone shopping earlier to find somewhere to eat dinner. Nat decided he wanted to eat Shabu Shabu, so Aki asked several people for directions to somewhere near-by that would have it. In the end, it turned out the place had already closed, so we settled for another restaurant at the top of a department store and ate Sukiyaki instead. It was a really big meal and completely delicious! I’m pretty sure we all finished off every bite… even if it took a while, since I completely fail at eating long, slippery noodles with chopsticks.




Where we ended up eating at.




View from our table.




Sally & Aki.




Nat & I.




Sukiyaki is yummy~


After dinner, we walked with Aki back to the train station and said goodbye before heading once again back to our hotel to collapse for real this time. We ended up watching more TV, though this time we found some crazy drama filled with a bunch of bad actors and pretty boys, which Nat and I dubbed “blondie” and “Johnny” respectively, since they both looked like they belonged to one of the boy-bands from Johnny’s Entertainment. Later, we somehow managed to find out the name of the show (Yukan Club) and that both pretty boys were ironically from KAT-TUN… Clearly we fail.