We just got home from another long day of walking, getting lost and finding small, yet delicious, portions of food. I'd say today was a success. We had class at 9am as always but Dr. Velikova and Dr. Bisson decided to give us the afternoon off because most of us were so burnt out from our weekend travels.
Some of us are taking third-year writing and Dr. Stover is having us write a paper based on a specific walk through Kyoto. After lunch in Kyoto station Shannon, Hunter, Ryan, James, and I all headed out for our walk of choice. We were walking towards the subway station when a Japanese man came up to us and said “Welcome to Kyoto!” We said thank you and the next thing you know we are talking to this man for 20 minutes. It started with him asking us how to say certain sentences in English and ended with a much more crude subject matter. It was hilarious and unforgettable and, thankfully, James got a portion of it on video. The man could speak English very well and kept telling us we had high IQ's. He was in his 80s but looked only about early 50s. We talked about Japanese speaking, diet, way of life, public bath’s, it was so great, like SO great. He suddenly had to run off to catch his train and we headed out too. After about 30 minutes of getting lost and confused as to how to get to our “walk” we chose a walk much closer to the city and found our way there.
The walk turned out to be really pretty. It started with a nice jaunt down a riverbank and then we headed to Yasaka Shrine. The map in the book wasn't great and we ended up no finding our way so we made our own way. After some chestnut ice cream, green tea ice cream and some interesting dumplings we walked though Maruyama, this really beautiful park. We were fascinated with the turtles and fish in the pond for about 15 minutes, as well as an adorable dog and a scared cat.
We continued to wander the path and 10 minutes later we ended up walking into this huge cemetery. The Japanese usually cremate but they put up memorials for the dead that look like gravestones. The cemetery was ridiculous. Hundreds upon thousands of stones, we climbed and climbed and took pictures and when we got to the top of this enormous hill/overlook we could see all of Kyoto so well. It was beautiful. The area was surrounded with trees and we could see the mountains in the distance, it was totally great and better than seeing whatever the planned walk would have had us see.
By the time we had our fill of the view it was 5pm and when we got down to the gate we realized it was shut and locked. We wandered over to another gate and found the same problem. Then a man appeared and let us out through this tiny door in the gate. We walked back down and navigated our way back to Shinjo Street, a favorite of ours. We were all hungry so the first stop was dinner. We ate at a traditional Japanese restaurant. By traditional I mean we had to take our shoes off and sit on the floor with our feet in a hole in the floor. After dinner we headed towards the station and after a few almost mishaps involving the subway and JR, found our way back to Otsu and the hotel.