Day Nine: Kyoto (Architecture in Helsinki)

Due to the lack of a laptop charger, we have not been regularly blogging for a little while. I propose to gloss over this error by posting updates for all the days we missed and acting like it never happened. So even though this is actually the very early morning of Day 14 at the time of writing, please pretend it's Day 9 (Feb. 10) all over again.

To keep this remotely interesting, we have to skip over like half of this day. That's not an exaggeration. The first 12 hours of the day do not merit mentioning. We were on a train. Then we had breakfast. Then we got back onto another train. And then another.

I know I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time reliving it, and all of you out there (those who have stuck with this silly enterprise thus far) are no doubt happy that I limited the whole experience to a single paragraph and half a dozen sentences. But fear not, because once we hit Kyoto things got more interesting.

After some searching, we found our hostel in the Gion (geisha) district of the city. It's a great little place called IchiEnSou run by a guy named Yashi. I highly recommend it if you're ever in that part of Japan. It's run by Yashi and a couple of his friends and they're great friendly people. Also, they make a mean breakfast.



Anyway, back on topic. We headed out from the hostel to the Fushimi Inari shrine, a sprawling series of small shrines scattered across a mountainside. The shrine is for the Japanese spirt of foxes, amongst other things, and statutes of the animals watch over many of the buildings within the complex. The paths are lined by dozens of red torii gates which guide you up the mountain to a rather spectacular view of the city. It was quite a trek but the view was well worth it.



We made our way back to the hostel and asked for recommendations on good places to eat. In some madcap series of events from there, we wound up at an izakaya with Yashi and two random Finns from Helsinki named Kare and Anise. They were great. Kare regaled us with tales of his travels, including the time he got shot in South Africa. That was a fun story. Anise spoke less English, but was still a great guy to hang out with.

Kare payed for the meal, ostensibly on the basis that we'd but him a drink at a bar across the street because it was his birthday in a couple of hours. I say "ostensibly" becuase once we were there he insisted on buying all the drinks anyway. We were dead tired after a day of near-constant train travel and mountain-shrine climbing, so we weren't the best company to party with. It was okay though: when we left, Kare was already making friends with an American (who thought I was an American as well, or at least imitating one. I have no idea why) and a couple of random Japanese guys.

That's February 10 out of the way. Feb 11 coming soon. Watch this space.