Arashiyama

We explored a bit of Kyoto on this rainy Saturday. We took the train over and got off at the Saga-Arashiyama station. There were lots of shops and restaurants. Jack and I got some street food- I got fried noodles and he got takoyaki, which is like fried octopus and dough fried into a ball form. Other than the rain, it was very beautiful. Most of the streets were lined with cherry blossoms that were fully bloomed. I even tried some cherry-blossom ice cream which was delicious!

We crossed over the main bridge and found the monkey park. We considered going in but decided against it since we saw the same type of monkey a couple of days ago. Instead we decided to walk through the bamboo forest and around some of the many temples in the area. We didn't pay to go in any of them but the walk around them was beautiful. Everything was a deep green and the wet foggy weather made everything feel mysterious.

We took the train and walked in the rain for an hour to get to the pantocho area to get dinner. We picked a steak house that had real Kobe beef, although none of us ended up getting that because it was so expensive. The guys got steak though and it was good. I got fish and chips because I wasn't that hungry so didn't want to spend a lot of money.

Here's the only picture of I took of the Pantocho area that I took before dinner. This street was right by a little river and entirely lined with beautiful cherry blossoms.

We were pretty tired and it was still raining so we choose to pay for public transport instead of walking back. That did save us some steps but not time, since we got quite confused with the trains. The first one we got on went the right direction but it was express so it skipped the station we needed. So we jumped off that as soon as possible (6 stations later) and got on another one, but that was going in the same direction. So we had to switch again and ride 7 stations back the way we came. Then we were finally able to transfer to the right line. All in all, it took us seven different trains to get home. Sheesh. All part of the fun of navigating in a foreign city! We do have a JR pass that we use most of the time and usually gets us where we need to go, but it doesn't include every train and bus. Kyoto only has 2 JR lines so our pass doesn't work to get everywhere there. Which is why sometimes we either need to walk quite a bit or pay a little extra to get us to a JR line.