We woke up early in Tokyo and made our way to the JR station to catch a fast train to Kyoto. This wasn’t as fast as the Shinkansen bullet train, it was fast though.
It was a short walk to our Airbnb. This one had several rooms, two of which were bunk bed style rooms and two had two regular beds. It was pretty roomy and nice to have a bit more privacy.
Shoes off!
This was taken the day we left. Everything was nicely made up when we arrived.
The view from the Airbnb
By this time we were hungry for lunch as our 7-11 breakfast only could carry us so far into the day. We found a small neighborhood sushi restaurant a few blocks away. This was really authentic Japanese style dining. This was not a tourist place. The hostess and chef didn’t speak English. Good thing we had Google translate. It helped us at least get an idea of what was on the menu. We ordered family style and also tried some house recommended sake. The chef was super nice and was happy for me to take a photo. I asked permission first.
Then we took the metro to the Tenryu-ji temple. It really started raining at this point. The walk to the temple was filled with cute little shops.
I had some emergency ponchos…
… and we quickly bought more umbrellas for everyone.
So many different kinds of vending machines. These capsule machines were filled with cute toys and trinkets.
This Prius is considered a smaller car in the United States but in Japan it looked big compared to most other cars.
So much rain
The temple was beautiful.
As was the bamboo forest near the temple.
Our entire traveling group in Japan
We had originally planned to see another temple but it was already 5:00 o’clock and the temples generally close around that time, so we decided to take a cute one car train into Kyoto for dinner.
Some of us, including me, were feeling pretty wiped out by this point in the day.
Dinner consisted of ramen at a restaurant in a big department store food court, which is very swanky compared to food courts in the United States.
Ramen Nobnaga was very good
Next we had to figure out how to get back to the Airbnb. The boys were all gung-ho to walk the 30 minutes back. We tried to figure out the bus route then gave up and took a taxi. It was a bit like an Amazing Race episode. Which team would get back first?!? Turns out we all arrived about the same time. Okay, maybe the boys beat us by a half minute!
Tomorrow, more temples and food in Kyoto!