Thoughts on Kyoto

May 8th to May 11th, 2018

Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash

This note is part of my travel series, Giant Leaps: a collection of my experiences from across the globe. You can view all of my trips on here.

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Things I Did

• Kyoto is a beautiful city that sits a 5 hour drive (3 hour bullet train) away from Tokyo. We (me, Ben, and Kenny) flew from Hong Kong to Osaka and took the quick train ride into Kyoto. None of us speak or read any Japanese so it was definitely an experience finding our way around. Everything is expensive in Japan, even staying in a dormitory hostel we were still paying ~ $50 a night.
• Kyoto has some tall buildings but not that many. It is a city, but definitely more known for its temples and beautiful nature. We visited several shrines including Fushimi Inari-taisha and Kinkaku-ji. Really hard to take good pictures of the red gates. The forestry in Kyoto is incredible…you can spend a lot of time taking in the nature.

• We ate a ton of really good food. I am not a big seafood/sushi person so I was a bit of a buzzkill on that front but I did find lots of good things. At the top of Kyoto tower there is an all you can eat and drink beer garden that was super fun and has a great view of the city. We went out one night to a random bar along the canal.

• Japan is full of arcades…walking around, you will see adults playing (gambling) on these machines everywhere. We tried to play but did not really understand how it worked.

• After three days exploring, we took the bullet train to Tokyo! The train station is super well designed.