For Thursday, November 3, 2011
Kyoto
I met Chris (from Australia) and Marion (from France) in the morning in the bar adjacent to the hostel. We biked to the Imperial Palace to see a cultural performance. We arrived late and saw only the last few minutes. Afterward, we walked around the palace grounds. There were large crowds because it was a special week in which they opened up the palace to the general public. Chris had been there before, and said that normally you have to visit as part of a small tour group. In addition, they had opened up Shishinden to the public, which even Chris hadn’t been able to see before. After an hour or two we left and had lunch at a nearby McDonald’s. (Don’t judge me. I had an urge.) I ordered the double cheeseburger meal, but was given the double quarter pounder meal instead. I just figured out why that happened today, here in Hong Kong. I’ll explain why later. I have to say that the fast food here is much much better than in the U.S.; it’s put together much better; it actually looks like the picture you point at on the menu. Then we biked along the river to Fushimi Inari-taisha, the not-so-gateless trails of countless orange torii gates. We hiked up quite a ways, although not to the top, or around, or whatever constitutes the furthest extent of those trails. It was getting dark, so we biked back to the hostel and holed up in the bar with our laptops for a while. I booked a hostel in Hong Kong and a flight from Hong Kong to Vietnam. Marion wanted to go to the Gion neighborhood and spot a geisha, so we hopped on our bikes again. After a little wandering, we found the area, but I think it was too late in the evening, because we didn’t see any. We split up, and I headed back to the hostel to get a recommendation for a good, cheap sushi place nearby. I strolled a few blocks to Kyoto Station and walked through it to the other side where some restaurants were. There I found the sushi place, which was certainly cheap: it was one of those places with a revolving track with plates on it that you take food from a la carte. It was good, though, and I left full of fish. I returned to the bar by the hostel and nursed a couple beers with Chris and Marion for the rest of the evening.