I live, I eat, I muse.: Hello Kyoto!

Took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto this morning. Love everything about shinkansens; the pace, the leg room, but most of all, the bentos that you buy to eat on the train! Got an exciting eel bento from Tokyo station, and it was pretty awesome (as awesome as you can get for a non-heated lunch).

[Off topic: A small etiquette thing: ok so we sat in a block of three seats. Lisa had the window seat, I had the middle seat and there was another passenger on my other side. Being on the non-middle seat, you already have a dedicated armrest all for yourself, so you should let the person sitting in the middle claim the shared armrest!]

Got into Kyoto around 2pm, checked into our ryokan, and went to Fushimi Inari-taisha, a shrine with lots of red torii gates. It was nice, peaceful (apart from one motorcyclist almost being mown down by a van), and very photogenic.

Torii gates at Fushimi Inari-taisha

Tonight we bussed to Gion for dinner in Pontocho-dori. After walking up and down, we decided on a kaiseki place that had an english menu with prices and photos out front. We asked for a private room, and thank goodness for the private room! We are terrible at acting appropriately in Japan, but the most trouble we have is when eating. I definitely have trouble sitting in the low-Japanese chairs. Plus we like taking photos of food.

The private room turned out to be a tiny room with just enough space for the table, two seats facing the same way, and space for someone to kneel next to the table to provide service. The seats faced a window overlooking the Kamogawa river, and it must have looked bizarre for the people down at the riverside to see us eating but not facing each other!

The restaurant and our seats faced towards the river. Wave hello to the people walking past!

Kaiseki was good, but I'm not sure how many foreign tourists they've had because most of the food it seemed like they were translating into English for the first time. What was cool was they had an iPhone that they kept using to translate menu items into English. Some of the more unusual things that the iPhone spat out were: lily bulb and wild boar. Dinner was reasonable at around Y8000pp.