From Ako City we took a train to Kyoto. We stayed at JHopper guest house not far from the Kyoto Main Station. We booked the hostel online but were unable to get a double room so settled for a 9 bed dormitory. The hostel was clean and had a kitchen where we could cook and watch English TV news programmes. There were many over 60s in the hostel and they were all in Japan to visit their children who were teaching English somewhere in Japan.
We caught up with David Holman who is doing his second year of teaching English. He took us to a sushi restaurant where the food travels around the restaurant by conveyor and you choose what you want as it goes by. Each plate was about 105 yen and if you wanted a special order it would arrive at your table delivered by a model Shinkansen train at a line above the conveyor. The restaurant had no Maitre`d and there was a touch screen where you made a booking to sit at a table or at a counter. It was all in Japanese so David was able to manage that for us. We wouldn`t have been able to work out what to do at all.
We walked around Gion which is the old part of Kyoto and saw Geisha (over 18) and Maiko (under 18 and in training) heading off to work.
There are several temples, shrines and parks to visit in Kyoto so we selected a few to visit near the city.
We also took a train to Nara to visit the temples and shrines there.We visited the oldest wooden building in the world.
There was a post in the building with a hole in it and kids lined up to crawl through it for good luck.
There were hundreds of school kids and they had to practise their English with any westerners that they saw. I had to sign their books and the lady in the group had to photograph the kids talking to me as proof that they had really asked a foreigner the questions.
