March 18

Taking the night bus is really messing with my head. Starting from 11:35pm yesterday: we got on the night bus and played patta-pon for a while. Christian had put his belongings on the ledge in front of him in the bus, and it was significant because when the driver came to close the curtains (between the driver’s seat and the passengers), he seemed honestly shocked that there was something there and covered his mouth as f he had done something horrible when he merely touched a passenger’s belongings.

I had a very unfit rest on the bus (with frequent waking and pain from my knee and toes, which seemed to be expanding inside my shoes). When we arrived in Kyoto (at 5:35 am), we were grumpy and tired. We tried to figure out the shinkansen, subway, and bus systems all at once. It didn’t take long either for the fact that we didn’t have directions to the hostel to set in. Luckily, I had written down the address, so we were able to ask a station master about it (and get a printed map), but it was a long, frustrating process.

When we finally did find the hostel, I was really displeased. The front door was unlocked and the alarm was sounding. Some other American resident solved the problem and told us all about the hostel as we sat in the slightly grimy common room.

When the attendant did show up a bit after eight, she seemed unorganized and a bit confused by us, but she let us stash our bags behind the desk (comforting because there was allegedly a cell-phone stolen from a tenant in his sleep) and left for Fushimi Inari. We had a bit of trouble getting there because we had to cross a major highway bridge to get our bus transfer. However, it was all worth it because seeing the jinja was amazing. It was so big that we had to turn back rather than tour the whole thing.

Getting back toward our hostel, we were pretty tired (probably from an early waking hour), but I wanted to see more, so we visited a shrine with a pretty bridge in front. We didn’t do much, but on the way back toward the hostel gain, we decided on a whim to take a road that looked small and traditional. It turned out to be a wonderful coincidence because that street turned out to be the main street to a tori and further to a jinja on the top of a large hill. Along the way, there were countless stores selling tradtional Japanese items and many people in kimono. There were even girls dressed as geisha and a fw who might have been real.

After that great adventure, we tried again to go back to the hostel, but we ended up getting turned around and around in an osu-like shopping district and ate ramen before walking all the way back (I had lost our bus map by now and we had to go on logic and the city map to get home).

We did make it and checked in. My hopes were not well-lifted. First, the attendant gave me wring change (because she decided to break the last 1000en into change, but screwed it up). Second, when we went to our room (revised from six-bed to eight-bed), someone had obviously been using our beds, so we were luckily upgraded to a private room. We didn’t have to worry about being robbed in our sleep.

After check-iin, we wanted to go exploring again, but not being clubbers, we didn’t have many options, since it was after nine. We did walk through true Gion; roads of nothing but wooden teahouses with red lanterns. Yet, there wasn’t much for us to do since we had just eaten and had no one to connect us with the teahouses. We decided to go back to the hostel to plan our next day and crash.