Kyoto - June 28
The rooftop bath was open to men on the day we left, so we got up early to hop in before breakfast. It was very nice; a little chilly out but a great view of the surrounding town and nearby Biwa Lake. There was a great spot where you could lay on this wooden bench and keep your feet in a pool at the base, which was super relaxing. After I started to get cold I hopped back in the big tub for a bit before we all headed back to get ready for breakfast.
Breakfast was a smattering of various little dishes, similar to dinner the night before. We thoroughly enjoyed the meal, and Stafu-chan escorted us to the elevator as we headed back to the room. I asked her for the time before we got in, and she pulled out this awesome little pocketwatch. Once we were in the elevator, we all decided that we needed to get one just like it.
We needed to check out by 11, but before we left I took some time to fill out the questionnaire they had left on the table. It was all in Japanese and I there were something like 30 questions on there, so instead of going through the whole thing I just wrote a short message in the "other comments" section. I'm sure my Japanese was odd, but I figured they would get a kick out of it.
After leaving the Yumotokan, we were off to explore Kyoto. Our first destination was Kyoto Palace, but we needed to secure permission to visit first. We had a needed to get there an hour before our tour to get that all figured out, but we needed to grab some more money first. We hoped that we could make it to the ATM and still have time to get everything sorted out, but it was not to be. Kirt was leading us to a post office he had found on Google Maps that turned out to be significantly farther away than we expected. We spent a while wandering the backstreets of Kyoto before turning up in front of the post office. By the time we got our money we decided to give up on the Palace idea.
It turned out that we had wound up just a few blocks from Nijo Castle, so we decided to go there instead. It was very hot and sunny that day, so we scurried from shade to shade as we made our way around the castle grounds. Nijo was pretty cool, with awesome walls and a great big moat around the whole compound. We were able to go inside the residence of the shogun (where Tokugawa Ieyasu once resided) and take a look at all the rooms. The rooms were all mostly empty, and therefore looked remarkable similar to each other, but the wall screens were all painted with attractive designs. One of the more interesting features of the building were the floors: all the floorboards bowed slightly upwards and creaked with every step. Apparently this was done on purpose as a means of detecting intruders in the night. We were all in just socks anyway as we had to leave our shoes at the door, so everyone tried their best to tiptoe across the floorboards without making a sound...to no avail.
There were plenty of people at Nijo, including at least a couple school trips. As we were walking through one of the gardens we noticed a teacher taking a picture of his class, and Brian offered to take a shot of them all together. They were grateful, and after the picture they asked for another one with us in it. We were a bit surprised, but we got a kick out of it. I just wish we had a copy of that picture.
After we had finished walking around we decided to rest a bit in the air-conditioned lounge. As we sat there, a couple of schoolchildren came over to our table and read us a short introduction in English along the lines of "Hello my name is X and I'm on my middle school field trip, do you mind if I talk to you?". We obliged and one of them handed Tim her English book to sign. There was a little table in there with a column for name, country, and a short message. Tim signed "Tim, USA, Hello from San Diego!".
After we left Nijo, we decided to really get down to business and find some taiyaki. We looked up a place in Kyoto that appeared the specialize in it, and headed to the train station. A couple stops and a short walk away, we found ourselves at a mall in some suburb of Kyoto. We walked around the whole place for a while looking for our shop until we finally gave up and found a directory. At first we couldn't find the shop listed, but we eventually found that it had been crossed off of the directory; the shop was closed. We were pretty disappointed, but we had some food in the food court and I bought a few CDs from the music store before heading back to the train station.
We decided the next thing to check out was the Nishiki fish market. By the time we got there everything was pretty much closed up, but we looked through some of the shops in the area. We had all been impressed by the comfort of the yukatas we had worn at the hot spring, so when we found a store selling yukatas Tim and Kirt couldn't resist.
We decided on Pizza Hut for dinner, and found one buried off through some back alleys. It was a delivery store with no dining area, so we got a couple pizzas to go and headed off to find some place to eat them. We eventually settled on what appeared to be a fairly quiet street corner at the intersection of two small alleyways. There was a concrete block on one corner meant to protect a nearby signpost from getting knocked over by cars taking the turn too tight, and it served well as a table for us. We had a good time eating like bums, and the pizza was delicious. One of the pizzas was some kind of teriyaki chicken with mayo and other stuff and it was one of the best pizzas I have had in a while. As we were chowing down, some nearby bar must have closed or event ended, and our quiet little street corner became a major highway for foot traffic. It was pretty funny to be standing there eating pizza off a street corner as people streamed by, giving us the occasional weird look.
After dinner we started off towards the capsule hotel we planned to stay in that night. In the train station we happened across a mother and daughter from Ohio who were a bit lost. They were apparently visiting because the mother was attending a conference and brought her daughter along for some sightseeing. We ended up pointing them in the right direction without too much trouble, much to our own surprise. A short train ride later we found ourselves at our hotel.
The capsule hotel experience was actually pretty good. We arrived and left our shoes in lockers at the front door, then donned sandals for use inside the building. We arranged for "rooms" and were given keys to our lockers. The entire building is divided between men and women, and had one elevator that only went to the men's floors and one that only went to the women's. The locker room/shower room was upstairs, and inside of our lockers were bedclothes, towels, and single use toothbrushes, shampoo, soap, etc. Once we all got our stuff put away and got changed, we headed up the capsule floor.
The capsules were roomier than I expected, and plenty long. Inside the capsule was a small console with a clock and alarm system. As all the capsules were open at the end (there was a small privacy screen you could pull down but no door), audible alarms wouldn't work so the alarms were all light-based. You would press a button when you went to sleep and the lights would slowly dim over the span of 15 minutes or so, and they would come back up whenever you set your alarm. I slept soundly the whole night, and woke up about 15 minutes after I had set my alarm.