Adventures in Nagoya!: Osaka Day 3 (Kyoto Part 1)!!

After Rana and I got up this morning, we headed to the grocery store so Rana could get breakfast and I could get OJ. I was able to get a huge carton of orange juice for 100 yen, it was awesome!!

Rana said she saw a rat scurry by while we were there, though. :/

So I had a banana and my two melon pan I got for 105 yen and the 100 yen Lawson's yesterday. They didn't taste as good as the one melon pan I got for 105 yesterday.

Then we headed to the station because we were meeting everyone at 10:30 to head to Kyoto! This time everyone was there on time. Cameron's leg hurt a lot so he didn't come, and Jaya and Andrew were still sick. So we rode the subway to Umeda to buy a train ticket.

We saw a sign for a women only train car too! So all the girls except Devon decided to try it out!

(All the hand holdy things were pink!!)

(Except this dude definitely did not look like a lady!)

Haha the guy changed train cars after the first stop.

At Umeda, we bought JR train tickets to Kyoto.

(I was really excited because this was the same train I take home every day from school. The JR bound for Maibara. I just catch it farther North, at Kanayama.

The train ride was so pretty! Rafa, Ben, Rana, and I all got four seats facing each other. We passed by the Meijo factory, which had a HUGE statue of a chocolate bar! But we were going too fast to get a good picture.

We also passed a lot of beautiful mountains and rivers.

After thirty minutes, we arrived in Kyoto!

We bought a day bus pass (which ended up being a stupid thing to do because we only used it once). The first place we wanted to go was to Fushimi Inari (the shrine with the thousand red torii). I was super excited about this because it was the one thing I wanted to do in Kyoto!

There ended up being no bus that went there, though, so we had to take the JR. So we took the JR to Inari station, which was built to look like a bunch of the red torii!

It opened right onto Fushimi Inari shrine!! So we took a group picture in front of the shrine. Then we headed inside. The guys wanted to check out the food of course. But they ended up not getting anything.

The girls got taiyaki parfaits!!! Ahhh they were so cute and good! A little expensive, but totally worth it. :) We got to watch the guy make them and every time he added a yummy ingredient like whipped cream or strawberry or pocky, we all squealed "oh my goshh" and he laughed and mimicked us! Hahaha. It was fun.

And then we headed up to the shrine! There were a bunch of little shrines first that we took pictures at and then we went into the thousand torii to walk through them! Yesss, this was what I'd been waiting for!

Every once in a while, there was a break in all the torii and you saw different shrines. So we'd stop and look at those. At one point, there was a path leading up a mountain. So we walked up that. It came to another shrine. I rang the bell and prayed, but everyone else was too scared to lol.

Then Rafa, Ben, Devon, and Heather wanted to keep walking down this path into the forest. I didn't want to, though, because then we wouldn't have enough time to go through all the torii. So Rana, Rashaa, Jose, and I went back to continue through the red torii.

We got to where the loop around the mountain starts and the map said it would take 44 minutes to get to the top! And them we'd have to go back down. And it was already 2pm. :/

We texted everyone else, who said they were heading back, so we headed back too. Rana told me she'd come back with me tomorrow, because she wanted fl walk the whole thing too! At the bottom, some people bought souveneirs and the guys bought some food, and then we stopped quickly in the convenience store so Rana and Devon could get this hot dog bun with noodles in it to split. It looked disgusting! Ben got aloe juice, which I've never heard of before, but he let me try it and I think I've found my new favorite drink! Holy crap, it was good!!

Then we rode the train back to Kyoto station. At Kyoto station, we caught the bus using our one day pass, to Kiyomizudera. I thought this would be like a temple on the water or something because of "mizu", but it totally wasn't!

It consisted of this huge walkway with shops on either side that led up to a huge temple at the top.

Ben stopped to get a bun filled with okonomiyaki! It looked really good.

Then we went into tho a omiyage place. They gave us free samples of these mochi triangle things I think Kyoto is famous for. The samples were Sakura and Green Tea flavor. They also gave us free green tea! (We had to return the cups though)

Inside the omiyage shop was a plethora of samples! I ate so many different flavors of that triangle thing and also some different types of omiyage, like these crackers filled with matcha flavored stuff.

Some weirder triangle flavors were chocolate strawberry and banana strawberry...

My favorite ended up being the regular strawberry, so I bought some of those for my host family.

(Cute bag it came in)

After Rana, Rafa, and I bought our omiyage, we rejoined the others and headed up to the temple. It was so huge!!

We bought our ticket, 300 yen, to get in. It was such a pretty ticket!

Since middle schoolers were 200 yen, I think a lot of people wear their old middle school uniforms when they go so they can pay 100 yen less because the girls in front of us in sailor uniforms paying 200 yen looked around my age!

We walked around the old wooden temple. I tried to find pink good luck charms because I don't want one if it's not pink. Everyone was helping me look for pink ones, but we weren't able to find any. :(

We did find something super cool though! The love rock!!!! Ahhhh! I'd read about this before so I was super excited to find it, because I'd had no idea that it was in Kyoto lol.

I closed my eyes and walked it with Rana guiding me and calling out directions because there was a big crowd of people. I don't know of that's allowed but whatevs. It was super scary. All these Japanese girls were watching us and giggling at Rana shouting directions and me being taking tiny baby steps haha.

No one else wanted to do it, but then Hearher decided she would so I helped guide her. There was a clearing between the rocks now, so I decided to do it over again and closed my eyes. This time we made it!

Yay, I'll be finding love soon!

Afterwards we looked at some more shops and continued on through the temple. There was this little waterfall area you could walk up to and put your ladle thing under the falling water and wash your hands and drink from it. I was the only one who did it and Hearher got some pictures of me!

Then we walked up to this pagoda thing we saw. Haha guess what it turned out to be?

"The Easy Child-birth Pagoda"

Hahahaha!

So of course we had to get a group picture on front of it. Everyone was hesitating, thinking there was no one around to take our picture, but I saw a huge group of cute Japanese guys and ran up and was like "sumimasen!" And waved my camera, asking for them to take a "shashin".

And they did! At first it didn't take, so I told them it wasn't there so they retook it. Then they asked me to take one of them. So I did! I accidentally turned off his camera first lol but then I did it.

The temple was closing up and it was starting to get late. Everyone decided that Kinkakuji (the Golden Castle I really wanted to go to) wasn't worth it. :(

So we decided not to go, and instead we'd go ahead and have dinner in Kyoto. We hopped on the bus to go back and we got off in downtown Kyoto. But for some reason the bus driver didn't accept our bus pass! So we'd wasted money on the stupid pass since we only used it once. :( And we had to pay 240 yen to get off the bus. F that. We've gotten ripped off so many freaking times on this trip!

So Ben kept going on about how he wanted meat and only meat, so we went into this building with a meat and nabe tabe/nomihiudai (all you can eat and drink). I saw it had a Sweets Paradise (all you can eat sweets place I've been dying to try) so I was flipping out. No one else sounded thrilled about it though.

But when we saw that the meat place was going to cost $23, Heather, Jose, and Rashaa agreed to go to Sweets Paradise with me instead. Yayyy!!!

So I did all you can eat sweets and it was totally fucking AWESOMEEEE!!! I was living my dream. For $15, I was surrounded by cakes for 70 min and allowed to eat whatever and as much as I wanted!! Holy crap.

So I had normal food first.

And then I dove into the amazing selection of cakes.

About 15 minutes before the 70 minutes was up, I had food baby twins and literally felt like I was going to throw up. But I didn't get sick guys!! It was totally worth it!

Gosh with that and the taiyaki parfait, I had way too many sweets today! Thank goodness Rana and I are hiking Fushimi Inari tomorrow!

After that, we went up to the meat place to meet up with everyone else. The waiters let us go back to their table. The restaurant was pretty fancy with low lighting, Japanese style seating, and a huge balcony outside overlooking Kyoto. It looked like all those fancy NYC restaurants.

They had all decided not to do tabehoudai or nomihoudai and had just gotten some meat and a large nabe for the table. Rana told me one of the meats was this raw chicken that she was grossed out by at first but turned out to be pretty good. Ew. I'm happy I went to Sweets Paradise and Rashaa, Jose, and Heather were too.

The train ride home was in the dark. We passed the Shinkansen at one point. It's so long! Miya, Yuko, and I saw the Shinkansen pass by when we were eating ice cream at the pool on Sunday. It was SUPER fast! I really want to ride it!

When we got back, it was already 10 pm! So Rana and I bought bread from Lawson's for breakfast tomorrow (by this point everyone knows I'm obsessed with melon pan and calls me over whenever they see giant melon pan haha) and then headed back and went right to sleep.

~*~ PICTURES ~*~

Kyoto station: