Day 10: Off to Kyoto

We got up early on Monday and made sure we had all of our stuff packed up and ready to go. We wrote our message in the guestbook and gave the manager a call to let her know that we were checking out and how great everything had been. We had the route all planned out, now we just had to get lucky and have everything work out the way we planned. We said goodbye to Asakusa and our little home and hit the road to the train station

Farewell Asahi building, we will miss your golden "flame"

Before coming to Japan we purchased two JR Rail Passes. These things are expensive but the benefits are amazing. Basically they allow you to ride as many JR company trains as you want for free. Since JR handles all the major lines between cities this means we can use them to get to Kyoto and any other cities we want to go to after. We stopped by the office and exchanged our vouchers for the passes then got a brief synopsis of how to use them. You can either ride trains like normal or get a reserved seat, since this was such a long trip (over 2 hours) we needed to get a seat so we headed over to the ticket office.

Once there it was even easier than we imagined, we simply showed our passes and said "two tickets to Kyoto please". A moment later we had our tickets in hand and were off to get some breakfast. We had less than an hour before our train left so we grabbed a couple of Bento boxes from a shop and ate them in the Starbucks waiting area.

The time came to get to the station so we dragged our luggage along and hopped on. We weren't sure if our luggage would be too heavy to go on the top shelf so we kept it in front of us for a bit. Once more and more people got on the train we decided we had to try so we threw them up there and hoped no one would get a nasty surprise. The ride was long but very enjoyable. We sat by the window so we were able to look out on the passing Japanese countryside for the whole trip.

We arrived at Kyoto station and were greeted with a familiar feeling of confusion. It hadn't taken long to figure out the Tokyo train system thanks to some help, a large amount of English signs and a couple of very helpful and patient people, now we were able to go through that all over again. We figured out that Kyoto has its own subway system so we got out of the JR area and headed toward that. Once there we were told to buy a one way ticket to use the subway. While this worked this time I knew that we'd be using the subway a lot over the next few days. I finally found a ticketing machine that had an English option and figured out how to get a reusable card and purchased two of them.Shortly after leaving Kyoto station we changed trains and finally made it to our new home in Kyoto.

Walking the streets was amazing. While Tokyo was a huge sprawling metropolis Kyoto had more of an older style and a more small town feeling while still remaining large. It was quite a change for us. Finally after hours of dragging along our huge, heavy luggage we had made it to our new home. We dropped our stuff off and almost immediately hit the streets to get a sense of the area and possibly find some dinner.

One thing that we noticed while we were out on the streets was that any group of young children would always yell "hello!" at us. While we've seen a few foreigners around Kyoto since our first day they are much rarer here than in Tokyo and we're guessing that we are an interesting sight for these kids who are learning and wanting to practice their English. At one point a group of kids actually stopped us and asked if we would "take picture". We assumed this meant they wanted us to take a picture of all of them but once we said yes they quickly gathered around us both and told us to smile. I think they thought I was Ethan Hawke or something, either way it was a fun time.

Chrissy knew about the major food street in town so after an hour or so of wandering we made our way there. We were greeted with the usual sight of closed restaurants and dark streets. We had been working on our eating schedule but were still off sometimes due to activity and travel. It was about 4:45pm when we first arrived at the street. We hung out by the river waiting for 5pm when at least some of the restaurants would open. When they did we made another round and eventually decided to go to a restaurant that looked pretty nice. I say "we decided" but really it was decided for us by the nice person who saw us looking longingly at the signs and told us all about the restaurant he worked for before walking us up and showing us to our table.

It was some sort of "private dining" place where you had a room all to yourself and placed your order through a tablet device. The tablet kept bugging out on us (thankfully it actually did bug out and didn't just fail due to our ignorance) so we ended up just ordering with our usual point and smile method...it seemed to get the job done.

I got some scallop dish with mushrooms and gravy while Chrissy got dumplings and skewers of various meats along with some edamame and beers (we actually wanted them this time so that's a plus). Chrissy's skewers included chicken hearts, fried chicken skin and gizzards which sound odd but she seemed to enjoy them.

Kyoto is already shaping up to be a very different place than Tokyo. Unfortunately we only have until Friday to see it and two of those days will be occupied with other cities that we will be travelling to. Tomorrow we're planning to try to hit nearly every major sight in town...wish us luck.