golden temple

End of day 2. I thought, for some reason, going to this temple, that the ‘golden’ part was a figure of speech. I was wrong. The crowds were pretty prodigious, but the whole thing is sort of a visual non-sequitur.

Posted by matt on 2018-10-31T08:10:18Z GMT

nishiki market and the bengal cat cafe

After all that walking, we decided we needed a nice, refreshing stroll. We met up with our friends that we’re traveling with and walked around the Nishiki market, which is a big sort of open-air mall, but not just your typical stores like a Zara or the local Sacs equivalent, but fish also stalls and sushi on conveyor places and vintage stores and hand-made stamps (you bet we bought a couple stamps). Just all of commerce, packed in to one huge pedestrian area, multiple covered open air walkways.

Posted by matt on 2018-10-31T04:31:48Z GMT

kyoto in the morning

First morning, Kyoto. We woke up early, rolled over, and went back to sleep. So far this trip, jet lag hasn’t been too bad, but we’ve been in a state of continual tiredness that is probably at least partially because of the interruption to our poor circadian rhythms. Anyway…

Posted by matt on 2018-10-31T03:58:32Z GMT

kyoto 1st evening

the first day in kyoto was really a half day; we arrived about 3 in the afternoon, and took a taxi from the station to our hotel. did a decent bit of walking, found a little beer bar and had some snacks. lots more walking, to a Ramen place where we ordered from a machine and ate like kings.

Posted by matt on 2018-10-30T08:59:41Z GMT

tokyo breakfast walk

This was the moring of our transit day to tokyo; all those blog posts were in my future, but you don’t get very far without coffee when jet-lagged, so we went to a nearby cafe that Sophia had bird-dogged and I had just a really lovely pastry and americano. It was situated on a small river, which you can see in the second and third photos.

Posted by matt on 2018-10-30T07:38:39Z GMT