Well, my last Kyoto day is over, and now I'm all by myself... But let me start from the start...
I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but a couple of days ago I walked by a Buddhist temple with temple-goers cleaning up the temple - it looked very nice, having everyone in a good mood and working for their temple.
OK, so this is what my last day in Kyoto looked like. First, a walk through a temple on a hill, with cute stones with faces. Then, a cool railcar up a mountain with somewhere near 70 temples and shrines, extremely cool.
Not so cool is coming down in the wrong railcar, which made us miss the imperial villa tour. Anyhow, this gave me the opportunity to get to know a bit of Smalltown Japan. Very nice, I should say.
After this part, we moved into a good ryokan, and I started with my clothes washing thing. It' s working pretty well so far. Then, dinner at an excellent restaurant, where I got to try sake - very yummy stuff. Dangerous ;-)
Today, Sunday, Fedex left for Tokyo and I came to Kobe. The Flower Road turned out to really have flowers in every corner, taking you to the coast. Very pretty to walk by. The city museum had some interesting historical displays. I moved on to an earthquake memorial site, where hawaiian dancing was taking place (that's what it looked like to me), just by the docks.
From there, I moved on to chinatown - mostly food joints, and had some coffee at a nearby Starbucks. On to the north side of the town, there's this neighbourhood with an international flavour to it, with English, French, Italian and German-style buildings. Lots of marriages, churches, and wedding clothes shops in this area as well - shivers down the spine, kinda. I finally found a hotel at about 5pm, and got me a well-deserved shower, then moved out again to walk along the shopping streets, have some coffee, get me some acceptable sushi, and walk into bookstores and CD stores.
And tomorrow I leave for Hiroshima, so that's where I stand now.... I'm dead tired today, and I'll probably end up in bed in a while. Thank God for Kinko's computer rental service :-)
Kisses to everyone I'd love to send an email to but my SMTP server figures I probably don't need to. Special kisses for the family and people dear to me (you know who you are). Mom, sorry I can't send email, I seem to be having some problems sending stuff.
Happy post-Easter to everyone!
M out. Yo.
PS: to the beautiful people who so willingly offered to pick me up at the airport, I'm arriving at 7:55am on Sunday on NWA flight 8. We can meet at the beginning of the arrivals lanes, near the United exit. Please send me an email to confirm. Danke!
