Day three saw us starting off with a rather cold buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant—totally not worth the ¥945 ($9) we paid for it, but it was food nonetheless. We shuffled back to our hotel room pretty quickly after that, to collect our stuff for check-out at around 11:00am, only to proceed to lug our suitcases back to the train station, down the steps of epic fail and onto the Ginza line for a short trip to Shibuya. We then hopped on the Yamanote line for half an hour of packed-in-like-sardines travel from Shibuya station to Tokyo… and then from Tokyo we booked ourselves seats on a Shinkansen an hour later to travel to Kyoto.




Nat fooling around with face masks in our hotel before our departure.




Sally at the kiosk on our platform buying supplies for our long train trip ahead!




Nat with our own supplies: BOSS coffee and chocolate, again.




Ours would be the second red train marked on that sign.




And part of the train before ours, before the platform became swamped by school students.

The train ride itself was pretty boring. It takes about two hours and forty minutes from Tokyo to Kyoto, so most of the time was spent by playing with Sally’s DS (when she wasn’t) and staring out the window, watching Japan fly by and change before our eyes.




Sally being silly on the Shinkansen.




Nat’s turn at being silly on said train.




Once you pop, you can’t stop!




A typical sight every time we had to travel for a long distance.

It was bordering on twilight when we finally arrived in Kyoto, and the first thing we did was get lost in yet another train station. Fortunately, a woman approached us (a first) and asked us in broken English if we needed help. We explained to her which station we were trying to get to for our hotel and she was able to point us in the right direction. We managed to return the favour a few minutes later by pointing a family of Canadians in the right direction to their train too. We made it onto the subway line with little hassle, and the first thing we noticed upon exiting the station in Gion was that the place was a lot quieter than Tokyo had been… and a lot colder too. Whipping out our maps, we started a long walk through the streets of Gion (the former geisha district) to try and find our hotel.

Four massive blocks later, we were still no closer to finding it than we had been over an hour ago, and it was beginning to get very, very cold. We had no choice but to suck it up and ask someone for help, however the only people walking around all had cameras and were clearly tourists to Kyoto as well! Eventually we spotted a nice-enough looking guy and asked him for help… and to our luck he spoke a little bit of English! He was visiting Kyoto from Kobe, but was still willing to help us! He left us standing on a street corner though and ran off with our map and his own Japanese one… leaving us wondering about whether he was actually going to come back or not. Fortunately he did a few minutes later, telling us he’d called someone from his phone and that if we kept walking along the main road we were on, we’d spot a Starbucks. Apparently our hotel was right near it, which was definitely very helpful for finding it in future!

We checked into the hotel with no problems and then proceeded to be very amused by the task of somehow fitting our three huge bags into one tiny hotel room. It was pretty much no bigger than a shoebox, and there was initially nowhere to dump our bags! We managed to fix that problem though, and just hung around our hotel room for a little to get settled before heading out again.




Our shoebox hotel room!




My bed!




Close-up of the yukata and paper crane left on our beds. How cute!




We have no idea what this said but the diagrams alone provided s with much amusement. Suffocation bags?




My brilliant idea for making our bags fit! Huzzah!




Our bathroom… Japanese toilets are scary, scary things.

Back out on the streets, we were able to take in the sights of Gion a lot better than we had been doing lugging our heavy suitcases behind us. We walked up and down the main street for a while, just looking at all the stores filled with hand-made trinkets, tacky tourist souvenirs and yummy-looking traditional Japanese sweets. We were pretty hungry by that point, but yet again finding food seemed to be difficult. Fortunately, it was about this time that some lady handed us a flyer, which we ignored, only to have her chase after us and hand us an English version! She was advertising for a restaurant just off the main street, so we followed her directions and found ourselves in this poky little place filled with old Japanese ladies having dinner together.

Feeling very out of place, we whipped out the phrase book to try and communicate with the old man beside Nat that had tried to explain the menu to him without actually speaking any English. Fortunately, everyone in there had a little bit and was able to help us out, and the lady next to me asked us about where we were from and if we were travelling alone and if we were high-school students. I managed to answer her all in Japanese, despite her English attempts! I might have been a bit rude though, since we forgot to use ‘desu’ a lot when put under sudden pressure… whoops.

As for dinner itself… well, we have no idea what we ate apart from miso soup and rice. Some of the food was quite yummy, and some of it was a little odd but oh well! It was a really interesting experience nonetheless and it was cheap, which was definitely a plus!




Believe it or not, this is a bus station.




My dinner… some kind of cold noodle salad, a thin slice of beef wrapped in egg batter, miso soup and something else presumably edible.




A view of the restaurant itself!

After dinner, we headed back to our hotel after another run to the closest convenience store for, you guessed it, coffee, candy and a quick flick through the newest Shounen Jump magazine to check up on D.Gray-man. This was also the first convenience store that we saw alcohol in, which also amused us greatly.




Alcohol in the convenience store.




The tapoyaki store at the bottom of our hotel… with Starbucks on the other side (out of view).




We’re such candy whores.

Back in the hotel, we curled up into bed and ended up watching some music awards show until very late at night. We didn’t see any artists we recognised other than Koda Kumi, and the last song of the show was “Why” by Ayaka, which made me squee out loud since it’s the Crisis Core theme. We faded pretty quickly after the show finished, since it had been a really long day.