Despite getting in relatively late last night, I still woke up, without any prompting from an alarm or anything, at a little after 6 AM. We got ready and all packed up, then went to grab some breakfast. Will and Andrew went to Mister Donut, a chain kind of like Dunkin' Donuts here, for breakfast; I stopped by an AM PM convenience store on our way back to get some onigiri since I wasn't quite hungry yet. We checked out of the hostel and went to grab the trains to Tokyo Station to catch the bullet train to Kyoto.
The morning was pretty uneventful. The bullet train ride was about two hours to Kyoto, during which I ate my onigiri, toyed around with my new electronic dictionary, and slept, mostly. We met Sayumi there and took some trains to a station near her house, and her sister picked us up--and by picked us up I mean she took our luggage back to their house for us while the four of us went back to Kyoto Station to get lunch.
One of the department stores attached to the station had an entire level of mostly all ramen shops, with some other restaurants thrown into the mix, so we had lunch at a ramen shop called Toudai. I only got a small, but it filled me up really well.
Then Sayumi wanted to take us to Sanjyusangendo Temple, which is a Buddhist temple with a thousand statues of the goddess Kannon, and other statues of other major Buddhist dieties. We weren't allowed to take any pictures of the inside, but we took a lot outside.
After that, we went and met up with Kim, my papa! I call her papa because she played Aegus in Midsummer Night's Dream a year and a half ago, and I played Hermia, and they're father and daughter, so. Anyway, I haven't seen her in over a year and it was really awesome to get to reconnect! We shopped around a bit in the Kyoto Station, then went and grabbed dinner at a cafe that caught our attention because of the parfaits they had on display in their window. I had some veggie curry for dinner, the the five of us split two giant parfaits, one strawberry and one green tea. Needless to say we devoured those pretty quickly.
We spent another hour or so shopping, and then Kim had to head home before it got to be too late, so we said our good-byes and headed out to our separate trains.
Andrew, Will, Sayumi and I are hanging out around the kotatsu (a table over a sunken heater in the floor with a blanket; super warm and cozy!) in Sayumi's family's living room. Her grandma welcomed us home and set it up for us, 'cause it was pretty cool and windy again today. Her grandma's very sweet; she talks pretty fast, but I can understand most of what she's saying. Right now she's on us about baths, having Sayumi explain to us how to use the shower and such. Sounds kind of silly, but the shower here at Sayumi's has all sorts of buttons to push, like for air conditioner and a drier you can stand under to get dried off. Will's showered, but Andrew and I are uploading our photos for the day before we go and get clean.
As seems to be the trend since we've been here, I'm exhausted and looking forward to a warm bath and sleep. Tomorrow, Sayumi's parents have taken the day off and are going to drive us around Kyoto and take us to lunch at their restaurant (which Sayumi says serves "Kansai-style" food, a description that doesn't really give me a clue what to expect other than deliciousness).
Oh, and because I'm lazy, I've decided I'm just going to upload all my photos to an external link and post that here, instead of going through and putting them all in all pretty like. It was cool for the first two days, but it's getting to just be a hassle since we're always getting back so late and I'm already tired. But Photobucket is being slow and uncooperative, so another day will have to pass without photos. I'll have to figure out a better system for this...
But, now, for some sleep.
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