Day 1, July 10th/11th - Flight, Kansai, and Kyoto
Left my family in Livermore, CA to go to SFO. At this point I had no Yen so we exchanged more money than needed (they had a deal that started at $600). Turns out the rates at SFO were a lot lower than anywhere else we would find on the trip. Oh well. It basically meant 100 Yen = 1 dollar. Easy math! The flight was good. 10 1/2 hours. Watched blades of glory twice and got my first dose of japanese from the flight accounements. Talk about a hard language to follow! When we arrived in Osaka (Kansai airport) the airport felt more like a wharehouse than an airport. Now frills here. It wasn't ugly but all the ducts and pipes were exposed and it had a very utilitarian feel. My first time through customs. Piece of cake. When we made it to the lobby, we were met by our hotel shuttle and shuffled off to the waiting area. I couldn't believe how many vending machines they had there (many more in my future, I was to find out.) The shuttle van was a european style tall van with clean seats and lace fringe everywhere. The driver had a sweet hat and driving gloves. This was the first of many exciting uniforms to come in japan (sorry, no pictures of these. i feel wierd taking people's pictures without their permission.) 90 minutes to our hotel through endless city, factories, and multi-storied golf driving ranges. We arrived at our hotel in Kyoto. Hotel was nice. Very clean and nice hard beds. A couple slight differences from hotels at home. First, no sheets. One side of the comforter has a sheet swen onto it making only a single blanket needed. I liked this. The bathroom light was on the outside of the bathroom (this must be an asian thing because all the hotels worked like this.) Didn't really enjoy this. And the toilet from the future. It took me a few days before I actually turned one on but this ended up being one of my dad's favorite things about japan.
Wearily, my dad and I struck out to explore and grab some dinner. Luckily, all the restaurants had plastic recreations of their menus in the windows. This made it easy to decide what to eat. But of course we couldn't agree on what to eat! So we ended up walking around and discovered the kyoto tower and a gigantic building which turned out to be the Japan Rail station (JR from now on.) The JR building is relatively new and absolutely huge. There were also all of these stairs leading to what I could only assume was a subway all up and down the street. My dad wanted to explore and when we went downstairs we discovered a massive underground mall called Porta. Very large, clean, and with many, many teenage girls pouring over sales racks. Lots of restaurants, too. We ended spending about 10% of our time in Kyoto exploring this mall.
Dinner still on the horizon, we departed Porta en route to an underground cafe across the street from our hotel (they had an english menu outside.) Once downstairs, it turned out to be a very traditional place; no shoes, tatami floors, low tables, and sitting crosslegged (or trying to.) No one spoke english, no forks, very loose descriptions of the food, and drunk locals. Awesome! The food was great, if only a little wierd (lots of indistinguishable stuff with no translation in sight.) Oh yeah, and only chopsticks. This was a challenge... When we payed the only japanese food related term I could remember was oishii (delicious.) This seemed to make them happy.
Couldn't stay awake any longer and went to bed at 9PM (8AM eastern time.) Ambien kept me asleep.
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