Kyoto April 27-28
We just spent a very relaxing 24 hours in Kyoto. Our Ryokan (Japanese guest house) was just beside of this picturesque view. It was raining when we got there from our bullet train ride (which was really cool!) from Tokyo, so we stayed in the Ryokan and took advantage of the amenities. We were given yukatas to wear around the ryokan, which was also complete with an obi and super awesome ninja socks! We took a private bath in the onsen located on the roof of the ryokan. The hot spring water really helped with my cold. It’s now all gone. A delicious 6-course all-seafood dinner was served to us in our traditional Japanese guestroom (well, almost traditional… there was a TV). Alex tried some of the seafood (including the octopus), but he really just couldn’t get past the texture. After dinner, this bald man came in and set up our floor mattresses on the tatami mats in super fast ninja fashion.
The next morning, we hiked up the mountain behind our Ryokan to check out the monkey park. There is a little place on the mountain where all the wild monkeys hang out. They can’t be touched or looked at in the eye, but they can get pretty freaking close to you.
April is apparently “birthing season”, so we got to see a lot of cute baby monkeys. They hang on to their mothers while they run around, begging people for food.
While we could totally have spent the entire day up on that mountain watching the monkeys, our time in Kyoto was pretty limited so we had to get back down and explore the area in the last remaining two hours of our time there. To help speed up our travel, we rented bicycles for 450Y each. This part of Kyoto was very bicycle friendly so it was pretty easy to move around (except we had to get used to the whole being on the left side of the road thing, instead of the usual north american right). We got to see some of the smaller temples. The very famous ones were unfortunately too far away for us to get to. We had soft serve ice cream and bought some yatsuhashi, a famous Kyoto treat. After that, we went on our merry way back to Tokyo.
