Day 10 - Kyoto, Osaka

Saturday 1

Our biggest problem in Kyoto was getting some morning coffee in our hotel room.  In Nagoya there was a Starbucks a few doors down from our hotel.  In Tokyo, you could make coffee in your room using a small pack of filtered coffee over a cup ($2.80 per cup).  In Kyoto, there was neither option close by.  Well you gotta have your coffee, so we did what the natives do - we bought cans of brewed coffee.  However, we bought them the night before and heated it up in the water heater that most people use to make tea.  It's actually not as bad as you might think and it was better than not having coffee.  Our next trip, we'll either make sure that there's always a coffee shop next door or we'll bring our own coffee and coffee maker or french press.

Our last day in Japan, we got up early to see Nijo castle, a short walk from the hotel.  We walked down and entered a huge set of buildings on huge grounds.  The sheer size of some of these rooms was amazing.  Some had 100 tatami - rice mats measuring 1 x 2 meters.  We found a real estate book with Kyoto apartments, where the bigger bedrooms would have 6 tatami and the smaller would have 4, if that gives you an idea of how big the Shogun's rooms were compared to what most people live in.  Besides that, the coolest part of the building were the hallways.  The Shogun was so paranoid that he had them built with "Nightengale floors."  These weren't just your ordinary squeeky floorboards like you'd find in my house.  These were wide plank floors that would "sing" from the sides of the hallway, so the sound wasn't coming from under your feet, but a few feet away.  Really cool sounding and a really cool concept.

I wanted to go to a noodle shop for our last real meal in Japan and it turned out to be both one of the best meals we had and one of the cheapest, too.  Linda and Rebecca both got some pork dishes, while I got a bowl of Udon noodles with tempura.  And for once, we got enough food by ordering the sets.

We caught a cab to Kyoto station, then got on a bus to go to Kansai airport in Osaka (about 30 miles away, but the ride took an hour and 40 minutes as the max speed on the "highway" is 80 kilometers per hour, or about 48 miles an hour.)  While we were in line at the airport security, we started talking to a nice guy in front of us who is a marine serving in Okinawa.  It turns out that not only was his last name Cleveland, but that he was from Cleveland.  Even more strange, he and Linda went to high school together, graduating in the same year, but they didn't know or at least remember each other.  The guy right behind us saw Rebecca's Ithaca Festival t-shirt and it turns out that he teaches here at Cornell.  Naturally, we meet these guys halfway around the world.