My Travel Adventures

We split up in the morning because each of us had a different idea of what to do with our last few hours in Tokyo. Ciaran wanted to have a nice breakfast at a bakery, while Brent and Joel needed to make a run to pick up Joel’s international driver’s licence from their next hotel in Tokyo (they had forgotten to get one while in the US, so they mailed themselves a copy). In the meantime, I realised I had not yet taken any nice pictures of the Tokyo Skytree, so I made a little trip to the Kameido Tenjin Shrine, where one can see the tower rise majestically above the temple’s old roof and the wisteria frames crisscrossing the gardens in front of it.

Our small group – consisting of Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and me – agreed last night that we would wake up at five thirty in the morning to catch the first express from the train station near the Tokyo Skytree to Nikko. We bought our breakfast at a 7-Eleven, which in my case consisted of one egg onigiri, a few little sweet breads with chocolate nibs, and a banana inexplicably wrapped in plastic. We arrived at the station in good time, but when we clicked through the options on the machine to purchase our tickets for the express, we discovered that the first train of the day had been cancelled and the next few had been booked out.

Brent, Joel, Ciaran, and I began our day at Senso-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo. Dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon, the complex is known for its iconic five-story pagoda and is believed to be the most visited religious site in the world. Compared to the temples we saw on previous days, it has an uncharacteristically steep roof, and photography is allowed inside (though I would say there is not much of a point to it as the interior is not very ornate). Brent and Joel went to one of the wooden stands to buy omikuji: paper sheets with random fortunes written on them. According to tradition, if the fortune on the sheet is bad, the person who bought it can tie it to a nearby rack and it will be burned by a priest.

Today was light on sightseeing, as Ciaran and I had to make the two-and-a-half-hour Shinkansen trip from Kyoto to Tokyo (not including the transportation times to and from hotels) and because we met multiple friends. As soon as we left our bags at our apartment near Tokyo Skytree, we took the metro to the very other end of the city to meet Kevin and Jaya at the Meiji Shrine. The shrine is one of Tokyo’s most famous even though it was completed relatively recently – in 1921 – using materials from every prefecture ruled by Japan, including Karafuto (modern day Sakhalin), Korea, Kwantung, and Taiwan. Although it did not really blow us away, we were impressed by the very roundly pruned trees in its courtyard.

We took the express train from Kyoto to Nara and ate our storebought breakfast on board. Optimising our time this way allowed us to be among the first people through the door when Kofoku Temple opened at nine o’clock. We bought the combined ticket for the whole complex, which encompasses the Central Golden Hall, the Main Hall, and the National Treasure Museum. I remembered that the highlight of this particular part of Nara was supposed to be its five-storied pagoda, but I could not see it anywhere. Only when I opened the map to find our location did I realise that the ugly grey building we had been ignoring next to the Main Hall was scaffolding draped in grey canvas.

The memory that sticks out to me as I sit down to write about our second day in Kyoto is that of our late-afternoon search for dinner somewhere south of the main train station. Ciaran and I were walking towards two ladies when their dog started arching its back to poop. Instead of waiting for the dog to finish and collecting the poop from the ground, one of the ladies held the dog with one hand to stop it from pacing around and used a tissue in her other hand to catch the dog’s poop before it even hit the ground.  

We left Osaka for Kyoto after eating breakfast. We could not find free seats on the train, so we stood behind the driver’s cab and watched the magic of Japan’s railway system happen. There were two men behind the glass separating passengers and crew. The younger of the pair was sitting down and apparently receiving instructions from the older one, who stood by and joked around, occasionally pointing outside the window and explaining things. The young driver had a screen to his right displaying the times the train was supposed to arrive at each station down to the very second, but neither man seemed particularly bothered by the train’s being two minutes late.