We woke up well-rested and met downstairs for breakfast. I had laughing cow soft cheese in bread. Chelsea had a weird pastry thing with pieces of corn and cheese on top as well as a string cheese. We left at about half 9 and got the tram and train into Kyoto.
Liam and Hannah had found a Manga Museum so we headed there first. It wasn’t as cheap as the monkeys, so I thought it was a bit expensive, even if it was only 900 yen. They had lockers that you put 100 yen into but get back at the beginning so we dumped our bags there. There were lots of different mangas from rude ones to car ones to penguin ones. The museum is on the site of an old school. The director really likes manga and didn’t like the stigma it came with years ago so built up the collection to preserve as much as he could. It was basically a library, with mangas in a few different languages at the beginning, and then in Japanese for the rest of it. They had a special African manga exhibition on too. We got a Kyoto pin capsule, a train capsule, and a fat bird capsule. I was looking for something with Astroboy on in the gift shop, but couldn’t find the right something. They had t-shirts notebooks, and towels. Although, all the towels in shops seem really small.
We got outside and were hungry so wanted to look for lunch. Then we realised there was a cafe next door that was sort of part of the manga museum and had English stuff on the menu, so we went there. Jamie, Reece, and Matt had pizza/egg toast, but said it was quite expensive for what it was. I had a hot dog which had some weird veg in it but was nice. Chelsea had pasta and had a happy little face because even though she likes the food here she hasn’t had pasta in over a week! Or cheese for that matter, and now she’d had it 3 times in one day.
Hannah and Jamie headed off as I’d told them there was a 3-hour hike up Fushimi Inari Shrine and a 3-hour hike back down again. Us other lot went to the Kyoto Gyoen National Garden. We had a look at a shrine and some koi and a tea house. We couldn’t really find anything else to do so got the train to the shrine. Hannah and Jamie let us know that it was only about 45 minutes to the top. The blog post I’d read that said 3 hours was way wrong. With that knowledge, Reece wanted to go all the way up so he went off and did that. Liam and Matt stuck together and went halfway to the top. Me and Chelsea looked at the first few gates and the shrine at the bottom. Chelsea sat me on a wall and then went for an explore of the shops. She found a food stall street and some gift shops. All of the others met up with us and we went down the food street. Chelsea got some candied strawberries which were a bit weird because they were hard and warm. We then got some rice wrapped in bacon-ish with cheese on top that the man flamethrowered. We enjoyed that. The others tried squid balls which got mixed reviews.
We got the train into the center of Kyoto so that we could go to the Pokemon Center. There’s a real lack of bins in Japan to encourage you to take your litter home, but an abundance of public toilets; clean ones in nearly every station. It was a bit of a walk and the streets were really busy, a lot like London. Matt spotted a Disney store so me and Chelsea had to go in there whilst the others went on to Pokemon. We had a browse but didn’t find anything we wanted to buy. They had some nice Minnie and Mickeys dressed up in Kimonos and a Kyoto store-exclusive bag.
We had a look and saw that the Snoopy shop was closer so went there first. We walked through an even busier market which had octopuses on sticks and other oddities. The Snoopy shop was really cool. They had biscuits, souvenirs and homeware. We walked to the Pokemon center through the busy streets and surprisingly the friends were still there. Hannah, Liam, and Matt were in the queue so we sneaked our shopping to them so we didn’t have to queue too as it was about a 30-minute one.
We had a cheeky McDonalds to keep us going utill dinner. Me and Chelsea managed to order on my phone. I played it safe and had a chicken burger. I ordered some cheesy potatoes but what came was a cheese sauce and a bag to put my chips into to make cheesy chips. Doh! It was only 50 yen anyway. Hannah said it wasn’t very nice. Chelsea had a big mac which she said tasted a bit different.
We went on to Yellow Submarine as the one in Akihabara was closed when Hannah and Liam went. It was quite a long walk practically all the way back to Snoopy. It was a bit weird and on the 4th floor of some random building and it didn’t really have the stuff they wanted, so we came out again.
We walked to the train for Osaka but Chelsea’s Suica (oyster card thing) had broken. We let the others go on and we had to go all the way back to the subway to get it fixed. That was practically back to the Pokemon Center so we’d done a complete circle and our legs were knackered. There was a really nice station man who pressed a few buttons on the computer and sorted it out. The Suica’s aren’t very tech-savvy for such a modern nation. It’s much easier to use contactless on the tube. The Suica’s seem to break a lot when lots of people use them as it gets stuck not knowing which station you came out of. And rather than fix itself after a certain time it just breaks. Anyway, we got our train to Osaka, which ended up being the local (slow) train, but we were grateful for the sit-down.
The others had checked into the capsule hotel and we were only ten minutes behind, so not too bad. We checked in too and parted ways as there was a separate floor for men and women. We both put our stuff in the locker, checked out our beds for the night and then went straight up to meet the friends in the lounge because it was the only place where men and women could be together. We sat in the lounge for a few minutes and ate the free snacks they had left on the table. Jamie was about to kill someone because he was so hungry as he didn’t eat at McDonald’s so we headed out to find the revolving sushi bar we had researched.
After quite a long walk we found the sushi place and headed inside. It was pretty much just like Yo! and had small plates of food going around on a conveyor belt. Jamie had 7 or 8 plates of sushi to himself because he hadn’t had much to eat all day. We were amazed at how fast he wolfed it down, although he did use a spoon for his sushi which made Reece cringe. The rest of us only ate 2 or 3 plates. I had tempura squid, cucumber maci, and onion rings because I didn’t want to push the boat out too much. Chelsea had an omelette on top of rice, cucumber maci, and cold grapeos which turned out to be frozen grapes with a mystery gooey sauce on them. We paid for the dinner, which only came out to about £5 each, and then headed to Round One for a few games of bowling.
Me, Chelsea, and Reece shared a game while Hannah, Jamie, Liam, and Matt shared the other. A nice Japanese man helped us work out the machines because they were all in Japanese. He saw us going up the escalator and came and joined us as he could tell we were silly foreigners. We were supposed to get our shoes by just pressing a button on a wall that had a list of sizes. The boys had to ask for bigger sizes because they only went up to a size 8. Although we did have to convert UK sizes to Japanese sizes. Once Reece had his bowling shoes on he put his trainers through the used shoe chute claiming that he saw everyone else doing it. Turns out we all still had our shoes and he had just put his personal shoes into the bowling shoes bin on the other side of the wall! The nice worker had to go and get them out for him but I think he found it quite funny.
It was a bit of a struggle to get the game started because the screens were in Japanese and there wasn’t a way of making them English. Eventually, we somehow got them working and started our game. The man had put our names down as E, F, and G which was strange but we made it work. Chelsea decided to hold the bowling balls like a football and throw them down the lane that way because she didn’t want to break her Disney-themed nails 2 days before we got to the park. The three of us played our two games and then a third one came up. We thought that we got a free game but when a lady came over to us and said we would need to pay extra for the game we soon realised it wasn’t free at all! She was very nice about it and understood that because we aren’t from around here we didn’t know that another game would start straight away. We managed to get out of paying for it because we had only played half a game. We waited for the others to finish their game and then we quickly returned our shoes and left before they changed their minds.
We made the long-ish walk back to our capsule hotel and all got ready for bed as by this time it was already past midnight. I wore the pyjamas that the hotel had given to us. I went into the shower to get changed but was so tired I’d forgotten to take the pyjamas in there with me so had to go back and get them from the locker. Chelsea thought she would be too hot wearing the capsule pyjamas so she wore her own. We climbed into our capsules and chatted for a little bit on Instagram about what our respective beds were like before turning out the lights and going to sleep.
