Kyoto – October 22, 2005

We thought that today would be a good day to take a day off from work. I told my supervisor last Thursday (October 18) that I would not come to work on today. When he asked me why, I told him that I had some personal things to do. He also asked if I could possibly switch with someone, and then come to work on Wednesday, or something like that. I told him that I needed to take Monday off, and that I would still also need Tuesday and Wednesday off as well. This also meant that I had to have them reschedule a training that I was supposed to go to on Tuesday (which was supposed to be my day off, anyway). Given the work environment of the last couple of weeks, I knew that I would be able to take off whenever I wanted. Paola basically did more of the same, except she didn’t give as much notice to her office. This meant that we would have three days to go to Kyoto.

This morning we woke up at 5 am so that we could get to the train to Kyoto early. The travel books that we have said that the trains to Kyoto were frequent, but we didn’t really know what that meant. I assumed that there would be a train leaving for Kyoto maybe every two hours. When we got there, and saw the train schedule, we saw that the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) leaves for Kyoto at least three or four times an hour. That was a bonus. We didn’t know exactly how the long distance trains here worked, so that is why we left so early. The guide books said that the train should get to Kyoto in about two hours, and sure enough, we got there in about two hours and twenty minutes. Basically, the Shinkansen only stops at major cities along the way. Before getting to Kyoto, we stopped only at Yokohama and Nagoya. I can’t say how fast the train goes, but it’s fast. I think that we basically got there as fast as we would have if we had taken a plane (especially since airports make you wait around for so long, and you can’t get on so easy as you do on a train. Also, the same guidebook says that if we had taken the normal train, it would have taken around 8 hours, and probably cost a lot less. Since we were on a time budget of three days, though, we decided that the extra cost was worth the time.

We got to Kyoto station about 10 am. Since we couldn’t check into our hotel until 3, we decided to start our sightseeing right away. One book that we had picked out 25 sights in Kyoto that we should see. We started with number one, and then moved from there. Actually since, the train station was listed as number 2, we actually started there, and then went to number one. There really wasn’t much to see at the train station, though, so we left right away, and tried to get our bearings.

At first we went the wrong way, as is always the case. But we didn’t waste much time before realizing which way was north. After that, everything was pretty easy since the street plan of Kyoto is more or less grid-like, which makes things simpler to find (this isn’t always the case in Tokyo, where the diagonal streets make it easy to not know where you are if you are not acquainted with the area).