Weekend in Kyoto

Quiet bench Stone monument Couple Red leaves

I met Roger and Marjorie for a weekend in Kyoto on Nov 25-27. Getting there was quite an ordeal and a bit expensive, but it was a fun weekend.

Rog and Marj were in Japan just for a few days on their way to Thailand, and my meetings didn’t start until Monday so the timing worked out really well.

I caught the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto; according to my GPS receiver we went up to 265 km/h. I think the Shinkansen has been tested at over 500 km/h but stays under 300 km/h in production. Anyway, it’s fast.

Buying a ticket for the Shinkansen proved more difficult than I could ever imagine — my credit cards kept getting rejected, for no good reason. Japanese bank machines routinely reject foreign bank cards but my credit card has generally worked here (e.g. at my hostel, and buying electronics) so I didn’t expect any problems buying a train ticket.

When my cards were rejected I thought my bank’s fraud detection system had kicked in, so tried calling them to complain since I had informed them I’d be travelling before I left; I paid $10 for a phone card, then spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to use it. I tried dialing a bunch of the usual prefixes and asking a few passers-by for help, to no avail.

Finally I found another set of pay phones that had stickers over them indicating how to make international calls, called my bank and was put on hold while I watched my $10 drain away. (fyi, swearing at the recording that says “your call is important to us” doesn’t get it answered any sooner)

Pretty annoyed at this point, I wandered into the street in search of a starbucks or something where I could use skype over wifi to call my bank. I found a free signal and sat on the sidewalk preparing to make a call, then remembered my bank accepts collect calls so just googled for info on making collect calls from pay phones. (one way is to dial 0051 to use KDDI’s international dialing service)

So… back to the pay phone, called my bank via KDDI (who managed to get through to a real person within a few seconds — wonder what the secret is), and was informed there have been no attempts to use my cards today, so it should have worked.

Back into the Japan Rail office to try again; asked them to try entering the numbers manually but that didn’t help. I asked if I could pay in cash USD since I had some stashed away for situations like this; was told no, then realized I had enough yen cash to pay for my ticket, just barely. Doh, wish I had realized that sooner.

Oh… earlier today I was wishing I had more time to explore Kyoto, Nara, etc, and kicking myself for not going there a few days earlier instead of bumming around Tokyo all week. The combination of that and the difficulty in buying a ticket made me very tempted to pull the plug on the Kyoto trip.

In the end, I made it there with about $10 left in my pocket, met up with Roger and Marjorie in a hotel for ants (Hotel Chuo) in Osaka because we hadn’t been able to find a decent hotel in Kyoto.

We went out for a fun and tasty dinner of kushikatsu, which is breaded deep fried stuff on skewers; my favorites were the shiitake mushrooms. We seemed to be the only non-locals there, much to everyone’s amusement. We kept asking (in English) for shrimp and due to the language barrier were brought oysters; it took a few orders before we made the connection so we kept asking again and again for shrimp. The guy we were ordering from must have been thinking “wow, these guys really like oysters.”

After dinner we wandered around a bit, then went back to the hotel, made a few phone calls on Skype on my laptop on the hotel’s free net connection and called it a night.

Zen garden Kiyomizu temple Tree forks Zen slippers

The next day we caught an early train to Kyoto, checked in to our ryokan (we got “the best room in the place”, with a really nice adjoining garden), and set off to see Kiyomizu-dera, one of the most famous temples in Kyoto. The weather didn’t cooperate very well so there are no nice blue skies in our pictures but Roger and I had fun experimenting with the settings on our new cameras anyway. (Marjorie was very patient with us throughout)

After escaping the hordes of tourists we walked around in the rain planning to have an afternoon snack at a train sushi place, and when we finally found one the plates started piling up pretty quickly so we decided to turn it into our evening meal. Great stuff, and only 130 yen/plate ($1.30 CAD); generally each plate has two big pieces of sashimi. Most similar places I had been in Tokyo were 100-500/plate, and all the good stuff was at least 200.

After dinner we walked around some covered shopping arcades to stay out of the rain, then back to our ryokan; we took a wrong turn on the way and happened on a really nice sake/liquor store, so we picked up a bottle of locally-made sake to share back at the ryokan.

The next day we wandered around Nijo Castle including Ninomaru Palace with its cool Nightingale floors. We took it pretty slow today; I had a bit of a cold due to a few late nights in Tokyo, and R+M were probably jetlagged. But we were all happy with today’s slow pace.

After Nijo we killed some time near the central train station, ate some octopus balls then grabbed our luggage from the ryokan and went our separate ways, until Dec 7 when we will meet up in Thailand.

More photos in Kyoto…

(posted Dec 20, back-dated for the weblog archive)

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