On Day 6, we were going to do some things downtown. It was a rainy day, so we decided to try to catch some Kabuki. We caught act 2 of Twelfth Night, but it was all in Japanese and we didn't rent the English headsets. The sets were beautiful and it was really cool, but we couldn't understand a word. It was a neat experience anyway. That afternoon we headed the to world headquarters of Judo, the Kodokan, where Rebecca and I were going to practice. When we got there, there was a sign on the door saying that they were closing at 4pm (when our practices were supposed to start) due to the coming Typhoon, which sometimes causes the subway and other trains to shut down. It was our only chance to train and it was cancelled - crap. Rebecca and I were extremely dissappointed and even Linda, who didn't want to be there, felt bad for us.
The next day, we headed for the Tsukiji fish market for our last morning in Tokyo. We got up early and headed over to one of the largest fish markets there is (they move almost all the fish for Tokyo). As we got off the subway at 9AM, we saw a sign on the platform - "The Tsukiji fish market is closed today." Our hearts dropped. It never occurred to us that nobody would go fishing in a typhoon so there wouldn't be any fresh fish coming in. Rebecca and I had sushi for breakfast anyway. The two pictures for this day are the view out of our hotel room. In the foreground is the Prince's Palace, in the background is Mount Fuji.
That afternoon, we headed back to Tokyo station to catch the shinkansen to Kyoto. We checked into the New Kyoto Hotel (not very nice) and headed out to find what turned out to be the world's smallest laundromat - 6 washers and 3 dryers in a room about 10 x 8 feet. To wash and dry 2 large loads cost us about $14, but that was way cheaper than using a hotel laundry service, where they wanted $3 to do one pair of underwear.
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The hotel in Kyoto does not turn your air conditioning on until you actually check in, so our room was incredibly warm. Bill really wanted to sight see but, being the voice of reason, I convinced him that we really needed to do some laundry. Especially since it had been almost a week and he had only let each of us pack for one week. Besides, this way our room would have a chance at cooling down. So, off we went.
We had to ask some lady where exactly to put the soap in the washing machine and I'm still not sure our clothes actually were cleaned but we thought they were! Regardless, clean or not, we wore them. While we were there an elderly woman came in to do her wash. She seemed very glad to see white people and, while we could not communicate, she enjoyed watching us and laughing the whole time. I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps she was just delighted to see us. Or, perhaps it was our complete ineptitude in knowing what we were doing. I know that the first time I opened the dryer and most of the clothes fell out on top of me that she thought it was the funniest thing she ever saw! At some point, she also let out the loudest, longest lasting fart we've ever heard. Fortunately, we were able to hold in our laughter, unlike her.
When we got back to our room, it was still not cool!
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