2/17 Kyoto

2/17/2013: Woke up around 7am again, the other 3 guys in my room also woke up around then. Partially because the older Japanese guy in the room started crinkling plastic bags for some reason and continued to do so for about a half hour. He then went back to sleep for some reason. A British guy and I complained about it together. Turns out his name is Guy, and he's traveling all over the world. He had recently been in Breckenridge for skiing, and had discovered "steez" which he was excited about. He had been in South America, where he and his girlfriend broke up, and now he's traveling around Asia. He's a banker and hoping to find work in one of these places. I told him to email me if he's in Chiang Mai later…hopefully that's ok with Ariel. Seemed like a nice guy for the 10 minutes I talked to him.

I packed up my bags, put them in storage, and made my way to "Amazon Café" for breakfast, which involved some coffee and a "Japanese sandwich" which was kind of odd. It was toast and egg, with maybe some seaweed, some sauce, and maybe something fishy? I proceeded to the temple with 1,001 Buddhas, which was pretty cool. Apparently in the 17th-19th centuries, they held an annual archery competition. One of the competitions was to see who could shoot the most arrows in a 24 hour period. The record was over 13,000 arrows, which averaged out to over 9 arrows per minute. Then I wandered up to another temple, and then through a bunch of different streets with shops and restaurants and things. I eventually ended up in a nice park and sat and read for a while as I debated about going to another temple. I decided not to go to the other temple, even though it's apparently the one you're supposed to go to if you're only going to see one temple. I don't get extremely pumped over temples, though, so I decided I'd rather walk around and see another part of the city, which is what I did. I returned to the hostel around 4:30pm, drank some beers in the adjacent café and talked to the bartender, a Japanese guy who for some reason is a big Phoenix Suns fan. I spent a while trying to plan out other parts of my trip - so now I'm heading to Taiwan on March 5, then flying back to Denver on March 9.

More Japanese observations: Everyone is extremely law-abiding. If the traffic light doesn't say "walk," nobody walks, regardless of how barren the streets are.

For dinner, I went to a "sushi train" restaurant. I now believe all food should be served train style. It was fantastic. I was nervous about eating sushi alongside Japanese people, since I probably made a lot of feaux pas'. There was a hot water dispenser at every other seat, which I couldn't figure out, so the girl next to me did it for me. Dishes were marked as either having wasabi or not. A few of the ones had a ton of wasabi, which made me tear up a little. Hopefully no one noticed. It was a great experience, I might go back again before I leave.