Tokyo Tofu Japan » Kyoto!!

Well the day trip to Kyoto was a nice change of scenery from that of JCMU. It took us about 45 minutes to get there once we reached Hikone station (by bike), and once we got there we ended up wandering around Kyoto station (the second largest train station in Japan, and also one of its largest buildings, period) for several hours. Made it to the one store that I knew I had to go to, and to my great surprise and joy, they were still selling Sirotan items!!! And by the looks of it, in the past 18 months, its grown into a full-blown craze. The two friends who accompanied me finally understood that I wasn’t crazy, and that Sirotan is indeed cute. They both ended up buying a pillow for themselves, while I made off with a haul of stuff myself (including a pillow, alternate cover, beach towel, stickers, and cell phone keychain/screen cleaner!!). After that we wandered around even more to the food section of the underground mall in Kyoto Station, and made our way to a revolving sushi restaurant. Not only was it nifty and tasty, it was cheap! They had these interesting contraptions on the bar where you could push your little tea cup up to a spout of hot water in order to get some green tea.

Eventually we made it to the outside world, and wandered our way over to Kyoto Tower, which you get into via a department store. We paid out 500 yen admission fee and got to see some really lovely views of Kyoto. Luckily it also happened to be a really clear day, so we could see all the way to the mountains that surround Kyoto on all sides. After aimlessly wandering around a bit more we decided to catch a cab to the Kyoto National Museum, which is known for its collection of Heian period sculpture as well as numerous scrolls and tapestries. We happened to luck out on that particular day, since it was one of the two monthly free admission days! After we were done wandering the museum, I tried to drag my two traveling partners to large shrine just across the street, but they were either too tired or didn’t want to pay the admission, so I wasn’t able to see it (this trip, anyway). With 2/3 of the group not wanting to go to any other cultural attractions, we decided to go to the entertainment district of Kyoto, Shin-Kyogoku. When we got there the humongous crowd was filled with nothing but trendy-looking 20-something’s. Hoping to find an arcade to play at, we wandered down some promising looking alleyways until we bumped into a fellow gaijin and asked for directions. He pointed us down the right path, and we found a pachinko/slots/game center (while gambling is illegal in Japan, they get around this by winning small ‘prizes’, and the walking around the corner to a small booth and exchanging their ‘prizes’ for money). The arcade turned out to be fairly small, made up most of ufo-catchers (known as the “claw” game in the US), 2-button style fighting games, and card-battle games (yes, they actually brought in their trading cards and were moving them around on some board on the video game). Luckily I found GuitarFreaks, a game I immensely enjoy, and got down to playing. Tried out the ufo-catchers a few times, but wasn’t successful.

After a bit of that, it had started to get late, so we decided that we should head back to the station to have dinner and get back to Hikone. By that time, the sky had gone from gray to pouring buckets. We scrapped our original plan of trying to hack the subways and caught a cab instead. Back at Kyoto Station, we wandered around the food section again and settled on a tasty looking place, and had some food that while it was tasty, I have no clue what it was. Had to rush to get to the ticket booths since we thought that we had to be back to Hikone by 8pm to pick up our bikes, so as we bought our tickets we realized we had about 1 minute to get to the train. Rushing into the first car we could find (and yet again, no seats) we ended up stuck with a group of loud, chatty middle-school girls. This ended up being not too bad, since we started to chat with them in a mix of Japanese and English, and they ended up helping us out since the train we were riding on went out of service at one station, and we had to get off of it and immediately hop onto another. Finally making it back around 8pm, we rushed to where we have paid to park our bikes, and found that probably we hadn’t needed to worry about getting there at any deadline. By the time we got back to JCMU we had made it just in time, since about 15 minutes later it started to pour again.

And here are the pictures:

Kyoto Station: