J2 – Gary Comes to Japan! Part 4

The last Kyoto day~

Mitch got sick in the morning, so we spent ages at home waiting for him to feel better. We skipped going up into the mountains in the north, so we have something to do next time!

We had a bit of a mission trying to find a locker at Kyoto station in which to put our luggage; seeing as everyone else wanted to do the same! We did eventually find one and grabbed the train.

We headed over to the bamboo groves in the end, and explored the surrounding areas until our train home in the evening. It was beautiful, and the weather was much better, so walking around was really pleasant. We even found time to go into the fancy garden in the bamboo grove. We had a look to see if a guy I once bought a balancing dragonfly from was there, but I think the light rain kept him home that day. The garden had a secret quiet house which we spent some time dozing and enjoying the peace. I got to do a bit of calligraphy too!

The station at which we arrived; check out those mountains!

Pretty window scenery means posing

When you come out of the station, there’s all these poles with kimono patterns in them. I took the dragon pictures for my mum mostly; what a sop 🙂 Also I think this is where Mark and Rob got off when they went to Kyoto for a few hours, but didn’t get very far!

Peekaboo!

Peekaboo2!

We ate at Tully’s for breakfast/lunch

A rather flooded river and a fanciful bridge

In the bamboo!

Thankfully it wasn’t too crowded 🙂

We found amazing Japanese glass coke bottles for sale, so we got one each 🙂

Aren’t they cool?!

The garden in the grove started with this pretty rest area

Exploring the gardens

Stepping stone paths are always pretty cool

Peekaboo3!

A viewing platform in the midst

The rest house

Me attempting some calligraphy

Gary took pictures of the sliding doors; they were lovely!

I made us each a little thingy with the date and location. I forgot the forest part of bamboo forest…. but oh well!

We wrote in the guest book of course.

With your entry ticket you get a free green tea and small sweet.

Mitch wasn’t a fan haha!

Our tea and sweets

I love this photo

bamboo tops!

Gary with his friend

After bamboo goodness we went for moss goodness. Another place I’d been before but again it was great to slow it down! The walk back to the station took us through another cool temple too which was a nice way to end the day.

Moss time!

The whole floor is mossy

This stuff is soft soft soft.

Tree moss

Mitch moss

Gary at the cool homeward bound temple

Huge temple grounds

Are we about to be murdered by a giant red guardian thingy? Maybe.

Me attempting to be a crazy red guardian thingy.

We got back to the station in good time and ended up having Chinese food for dinner. It was really spicy, but super yummy. Gary and I got a crazy matcha dessert too 🙂 Then back to Tokyo/Chiba on another bullet train in pure styyyyle.

Dinner!

puddin’

Bye Kyoto!

J2 – Gary Comes to Japan! Part 2

Time for actual Kyoto! In three days we managed to hit most of the tourist spots and eat a good amount of ice cream 🙂

Our first destination was Ginkakuji; a big old temple I hadn’t managed to get to before. The scenery was really pretty, with sand sculptures and moss and praying mantis…

View from our place; we had a great balcony

Pill popping pharmacy logo…

Concrete slide!

Ready to hop on a train to our first Kyoto adventure!

Our first Kakigouri of the year; we really needed it after walking about half an hour in the heat to the temple!

We made it!

Sand Fuji

More sand! Waves this time

Peekaboo

One of my favourite pics from the trip

🙂

See? Really pretty.

Selfie!

And post temple ice cream is perfection

From there we walked down the Philosopher’s Path to the next temple, which turned out to be waaay cooler than we realised! You could go up the top of the gate in Nanzenji. It was cooler and shaded up there so we spent a good amount of time relaxing.

Black dragonflies!!

How cool is that? Like an insect night fury….

Another of my favourite pictures ❤

Man I wanted to poke this thing

This man feeds all these cats every day. It was really fun to watch

Mitch with his new friend

Mad kitty

We did a lot of walking 🙂

Taking a rest

Oh hey!

cool buildings everywhere

Daww

Off the path, on to the roads and heading to Nanzenji. Coffee from the vendy!

Japan scenery is pretty cool.

The top of the gate at Nanzenji. Very awesome.

Here we are!

Gary enjoying the height…. not so much 😛

we took out shoes off and everything!

It’s very green in Kyoto. Less so in Tokyo

seriously gorgeous

We didn’t take many photos in the temple itself, but here’s a pretty lantern thing.

After Nanzenji, we walked down the overgrown railway track thing nearby, which was pretty interesting in the middle of the city.

The end of the tracks!

We carried on walking towards the town and the next temple; which I realised with a start I had already visited in my last trip! But all I remembered from last time was the sand garden bit. I didn’t realise that there was loads of stuff to do with Tsukumogami – everyday items that have been chucked away but took offense to this, gained a spirit and cause mischief. I did a wee essay on them for a module on my year abroad! It was great to revisit and have connections from before that I didn’t even know I had. Plus there’s cool dragon stuff there.

On the way, a massive gate to another shrine we didn’t go to

This tree is amazing!

The historic bit

A wee tea house in Kodaiji

First taste of bamboo

This dragon was so cool!

The entrance is quite picturesque

Good views

This is where I suddenly recognised where I was!

Mum, I took this one for you. They said photos weren’t allowed, but it was too cool for your to miss!

Lush grounds

My zoom is pretty darn fancy

Once you climb to the top in Kodaiji you suddenly get this magnicifent view over the city. It’s pretty awesome.

I loved seeing the designs of all the discarded items with souls!

We literally stayed till close, and were walking out in this procession with a member of staff behind us like a shepherd XD We wandered back to the town and moseyed about, looking for dinner! We decided on Japanese curry, a favourite of Gary’s. He was amazed by putting cheese in it, but we swayed him pretty quickly 😀

We found a Ghibli shop!

Dinner time 🙂

I’ll end day one with a picture of all the tickets and stuff I got from the day 🙂

Hiroshima Holiday – Second Day Farming

This was probably the most fun day of the whole trip! And also the most painful, but I’ll get to that! 😛

Today the bell and announcement went off as usual, but we also had bonus washing machine noises! The one right next to the window-walls was on around 6.30am. Alas. Breakfast was the usual, but today I started my putting cold things in warm soup and it worked out. Sadly one of the girls had to go home today so she couldn’t come with us to the day’s fun outing. We went to somewhere called Sera Winery which was mostly fun for the shop and the Dream Park, which was amazing fun!

 

We started the day with some more clearing of the bus place first, Shimohara finally gave us some proper instructions and we realised he wanted absolutely everything gone, not just the one pile of bamboo he pointed to the day before. This actually turned out to be really fun! It seemed that it was some kind of old polytunnel place so the whole floor (under the crazy amounts of random plantlife) was covered in plastic! We had to rip this all up and stick it in a big pile which ended up being about the size of a car. Now I love breaking things up with all my strength; I think in my past life I was a wrecking ball, so I really enjoyed grabbing plastic and yanking it repeatedly or sawing through the thousands of bamboo roots which had grown under, round, through and over it. It was quite something actually, the was the roots had gotten into it. We also got to use all the new-looking bamboo to make a huuuuge fire! Bamboo makes huge bangs when you burn it so when we put the new logs on we had to avoid being shot at! It really did shoot hot air and smoke at you! Sadly I didn’t get many photos but here are the few I did:

Some non-bamboo roots that had formed a carpety thing!

Building the giant bamboo fire

You can see the beginnings of the plastic pile by the hut

flaaaaaames

Happy with our efforts

Going back to the house in the truck

I appear to be turquoise today.

Lunch time came around and we all made onigiri together and put them together with some chopsticks in a big container to take as lunch to the park. Firstly we went to the winery. It was cool, but pretty derelict. There was barely anyone there and it looked like it was still waiting for things to be built! The shop was cool though, they had loads of wine flavoured things; from tea and jam to sweets and bread! They also let you sample the wine which was really tasty surprisingly! I’m not a huge fan of wine but the sweet one was delicious.

Trying some wine

Cheers!

The shop

The wine stand

Outside the shop

The courtyard

For some reason they had a Thomas land! Japan seems to love Thomas Lands…

There was a part where you could check out the processes

The entrance is shaped like a wine bottle!

I should mention by the way that there were 6 of us and only a five seater car. Guess who ended up lying across everyone in the back seat! Lovely and safe. Good fun though, riding in a car is quite different when you’re horizontal! After the winery we headed off to the park. Sadly it was raining and quite windy but we had a great time anyway! It made eating lunch quite hard with stuff blowing all over but it was tasty none-the-less. We had pringles, onigiri, onion soup and some sweeties. Then Shimohara had to go and tend to something and said he’d be back so we went and played! There was no one else there and we had the place to ourselves. We went to the crazy playpark bit first, but the main attraction was the huge slides on the hill! They were something like flumes and in the rain they were utterly deadly. They had no ending bit to slow down so we all just shot off the end and either landed on our bums or rolled over! I went down twice as did the guy we were with, but I sort of wish I didn’t!

Transport mode

Lunch!

Nom nom

The play park bit

I came to find Bekah trapped on the spinny thing!

Yzzy had jumped off and seemed pretty dizzy!

cave…?

A BALL POND IN A PARK! Genius.

Ball wars

Like being 5 again 🙂

The ball pond hut

Asparagus…? It seemed very farm themed… Maybe to get the kids started from an early age? “You remember how much you loved asparagus at the dream park Jimmy? NOW FARM IT!!”

Very sad looking cows with some happy people

Moo

Piggies

Grapes and some other things

god knows how you ride this but I gave it a go. It became a balance game for me

The view from the hill to the slides

Up to the top

View of the park from the top

SLIDES!!!

There was no such thing as stopping

Wee!

Bekah looking terrified

He shot himself down so fast!

This is the reason I regretted the second slide down!

Random fish on the way out

 

So some very wet bums, sore hands and happy smiles later, we had to go. Thankfully, we got taken to a hot spring place which had a warm-room where we sat for a couple of hours to dry. We sat in front of the heater and also had some crazy massages from those chairs you put a few bob in.

The warm room

Thankfully we didn’t have to do any more work that day which was great. We hid ourselves in the kotatsu (the warm table) and started booking our hostel for the second half of the holiday. We also took Fuku-chan for a walk around and through a shrine which was fun! After dinner Yzzy gave us all some matcha Kit-Kats which are bright green and delicious, and Bekah gave us some sakura tea that she’d bought in the winery. We chatted for a while and went to bed about 10pm!

Hiding from the coooollldddd

Walking the dog; entrance to the shrine

Many stairs later we got to the pretty part

Matcha Kit-Kat and Sakura tea

That’s the end of day two, but I’ll part with a bonus picture of this little light-pull guy: