I’m going to have to do a quick mashup of two days worth of activities on this post. Yesterday we took the bullet train (shinkansen) from Tokyo to Kyoto. We were pretty sad to part ways with all the new friends that we made while staying at Oak Hostel but everyone seemed to be leaving on the same day.

I thought it was going to be a long ride but it went by pretty quickly. We picked up a few bento boxes at the station as I read that they’re a very coveted part of any bullet train trip. The total trip took about 2 1/2 hours to get to Kyoto, it wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be but we were going very fast. I seriously wonder what is going on in the background in America that won’t allow us to have such an efficient form of transportation. It would be amazing to go from Minneapolis to Chicago in less than 3 hours on a high speed rail train.

We’re staying at the Khaosan Tokyo Theater Hostel. It’s a little disappointing that we started the trip with such a great hostel, meeting super nice people and this one is just ok. We’re in a room with 14 other bunks and there’s a Chinese lady that thinks she can hang her smelly laundry and granny panties in the room and take up space for 4 people. I’ve realized quickly that people in Japan DON’T wear deodorant. When the temperature is 95 with a super high humidity, you start smelling things you can’t unsmell. This is one of those situations, our room current smells like an old sour damp towel that hasn’t been washed in weeks. I asked her if those clothes were hers in the most polite way I could in Mandarin, she said no, I left the room and Kimberly saw her smelling the clothes because I said that they have a smell. Arg…FOB Chinese….

The hostel is right next to the Nishiki Market which is a shopping and food district in Kyoto. Here’s some food pics.

We visited the Nara region right outside of Kyoto. Nara is known for deer who have completely gotten used to humans to the point where they depend on being fed. We bought these cracker things for $1.5 and when they saw that we had them, they swarmed us and got aggressive. In case you’re wondering, the entire area smelled like a petting zoo. It’s super weird seeing these wild animals being so calm around people. I grew up being told to never feed wild animals. We hiked around for a while and there were a few temples we could have visited but we’re reaching temple fatigue where they all end up looking the same because we’re not familiar with the architecture or history.

I’ve learned that Japan is weird about animals, there’s the deer park in Nara, the deer island (Miyajima), a rabbit island (Okunoshima), a cat island (Aoshima), a fox village in Miyagi, and we’re going to the monkey park tomorrow at Arashiyama.