We didn't have to get up too early to get to Kyoto since Nagoya was only half an hour away by Shinkansen. Thankfully, the weather cleared up and it was bright and sunny again. We checked out of the hotel, got bento sets at the station and was on our way to Kyoto by 11am.
Since I've already been to Kyoto a couple of times, once last year and once this year, little sis decided that she didn't want to go to somewhere that I have been. We got to the tourist information centre and put our bags in the lockers nearby and bought an all day bus pass around Kyoto. The bus pass covered all the must-see sights in Kyoto, so we thought we could go to most of it if time allowed us.
We went to Ginkakuji (Silver Pavillion) first and wasn't too impressed, it was actually kind of small but had a zen garden and some small hills which you could climb up to which had pretty nice sights of Kyoto.
After visiting Ginkakuji, we walked down Philosopher's Path and got some nice matcha ice-cream and waited for the bus to take us to Kinkakuji. We got on the wrong bus and ended up at the bus terminal where the conductor told us where to wait for the one that would take us to Kinkakuji. While waiting for the bus, we met an old man who sat next to us at the bus stop and was asking for directions. He was surprised I wasn't Japanese (lol my life), he said I really had a "Japanese" face, whatever that means.
To our surprise, he could speak English really well and asked us where we're from. Little sis said Singapore and he showed us photos of him in the army during World War II, which I thought was pretty interesting.
I never had grandparents, all of them died before I was born. One thing I always wanted was to talk to someone of that age about those kind of things. Later on, he showed us his wedding photos too, his wife was really pretty dressed up in a kimono. He said she was 24 then, and he was 30. Definitely was one of the highlights of that day. Soon, the bus he was waiting for came and he told us it was nice to have met us. Little sis and I both agreed that it was an interesting encounter.
We finally got to Kinkakuji (Golden Pavillion) at about 3 in the afternoon. It was really pretty compared to Ginkakuji. There were way more people here than at Ginkakuji, after taking some nice shots of the temple, we were like "now what?". It's the same as seeing the Big Buddha in Kamakura, you see it, take photos, then what? We went to walk around the area and there was a tea garden. I tried really good matcha back in May with Yuri in Kamakura in the Bamboo forest, but since little sis haven't tried it, we just bought 2 drink tickets and waited for the tea to be served.
This one wasn't as crowded or hard to get seats compared to the one in Kamakura. The matcha was good, I'm glad little sis liked it too. We spent some time resting there since we have been walking the whole day.
After that, we decided to go to Gion because we haven't been there. Once we got there, it was already evening. We were overwhelmed by the number of tourists and got out of the street pretty quickly. We went to walk around, somewhere that was not as crowded. We bought some stuff for mom and went to the river where I went with Felix last autumn.
There were a couple of shops that I thought was cute.
We didn't stay in Kyoto for the night, we wanted to but when we were doing our planning and booking of hotels, most of them were fully booked with only the really expensive and luxurious ones left, so we had no choice but to stay in Osaka.
We left for Osaka at about 7pm, and arrived at our hotel coming to 8. We checked into Hotel Nikko which was really really fancy. The only reason why I could afford it is because I had JAL Coupons, haha. Our room was on the 27th floor and the view was really nice, we could see Shinsaibashi and Amerikamura from our room.
After resting up and putting down our "luggage", we went to Shinsaibashi for dinner. We really didn't know what to eat, so we just went to the restaurant we did four years ago on our first trip to Japan. We ordered the blowfish set meal and was so happy. They cooked the fish in different ways, deep fry, steamed and raw.
We didn't do much after dinner but walked around Shinsaibashi until we got really tired and went back to the hotel to sleep.
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