Kyoto - Part 1

We have had a pretty crazy few first days with the jet lag! We have gotten used to 4am wake-ups and 7pm bedtimes and are slowly trying to move the needle towards a more manageable schedule.

In our first few days, we rode a bullet train to Kyoto (saw Mt. Fuji from the train), took the subway and local rail, ran a mile each day up the Kamo river, hiked up the trail of 1000 Tori gates at Fushimi-Inari Tasha (fox deity) shrine, saw a few dozen Buddhist temples, ate Ramen, curry, french pastries, and 7/11 meals, and dodged thousands of tourists searching the Kyoto landscape for Instagram photos.

It's been a lot to be sure. The landscape here is incredible, the architecture is otherworldly, and the food is just better and cheaper than anything we have back home. The Japenese have a carefully balanced cuisine, and we've loved eating their food, but they also seem to be better than America at all the western foods too. Even the McDonald's was better.

Japan cracks open the narrative on what we consider "convenient" in the US and substitutes its own. Many places are cash-only, and most Japanese speak only a few words of English. In many cases, we receive coins as change from one restaurant that are unusable as another since they are so low value (1 yen coins for example are 3/4th a penny and no one wants them). These sound like the building blocks of a travel nightmare, but Japan provides us with many extremely convenient workarounds. 

There are ATMs at almost every store and street, the Japanese often have English signs and English menus within the tourist zones, and are happy to use Google translate in other cases. For casual purchases such as drinks and snacks, there are low cost vending machines literally everywhere you look that often accept credit. 

Beyond this, there are amazing extras that the US has never considered and probably never will. In Kyoto, the subway system runs underneath most of the city, but so does a massive underground shopping center with free bathrooms and a variety of services and foods. You can avoid bad weather, have access to clean bathrooms for free, and eat whatever you like. In fact, every train and subway station we have used has had multiple clean, free bathrooms. One even had a bidet attachment (common in most Japanese restaurant, hotel, and home bathrooms).

 Additionally, the convenience store "konbini" culture provides countless enhanced storefronts that sell everything from food to alcohol, to dress shirts and hats, sunscreen, and whatever you need on the go. Unlike the US, these stores are very clean, extremely safe, and the employees are very accommodating.

There are countless little touches as well. On the train from Kyoto to Nara, we noticed an incredible invention: reversible seats. You can take any row of seats on the train and simply move them from facing forwards to facing backwards. This allows families to make seats face each other for groups of 4 or let's smaller groups avoid sitting face to face with strangers.

We took a day trip to Nara today and found it to be an incredibly peaceful place in spite of the tourism industry. There were thousands of tourists at the main temple and in the parks, and we saw plenty of them feeding the wild, tame white tailed Nara deer (a famous experience anyone can do for 1.50$ of feed). We were able to take a few small turns away from the crowds and found plenty of completely empty spots to just sit and listen to the rain and relax.

And the deer were everywhere.

We have a few more days in Kyoto. Tonight we will try some traditional Kyoto home-style food at a reservation, and tomorrow we will probably see our first Japanese castle. Most are concrete rebuilds of medieval castles because of the various fires and wars, but we will see an original in Himeji next week!