Last night as we were climbing into our bunks, Ryan asked if it had ever occurred to me that I might be the best one off in our threesome.
Y’see… Kellen has a head cold and while he was a trooper yesterday, we are taking an easy day today. And walking nearly 10 miles yesterday took its toll on Ryan’s re-injured foot (after the slow time of it in KL, the same thing happened in Vietnam as we were changing planes as happened in Bukit Lawang [minus the motorbike]).
So me and my allergy to all things gluten are the healthiest in the group.
But to what the subject of this post says it’s going to talk about.
When we touched down in Tokyo, I connected to the WiFi and let Kellen know we had arrived. He said he’d be at Arrivals. Ryan and I wandered through the maze of Narita, emigration, customs, and whatnot. After we crossed the last security check, Kellen was there, but it took us a minute to find him.
He was wearing shorts. Ryan walked right by him.
Together, we gathered our rail passes and the boys went to get our pocket WiFi while I changed our remaining ringgit into yen. And I waited and waited for them near the rail line. I skyped Kellen. No answer. When they finally came downstairs, they were laughing. Apparently, they’d been interviewed for a local news story about international tourism. From what I’ve gathered, the interviewer was really excited to have found a gay couple and was a bit over the moon to learn that they also had a wife. Ryan would like to add that the translator spent half the time trying to explain that only one of them had a wife.
The money exchange was not that eventful.
And then we were on the Narita Express. And onto the Shinkansen and Kyoto. I slept through a fair deal of the train trip. (A bit of cross contamination our last evening in Singapore was still bothering me.) The boys caught up while I dreamt.
When we arrived in Kyoto, we went directly to our hostel to drop our bags because they are heavy! After quickly looking at the provided map, we decided to walk to Chion-in. This is the home of the Jodo Shu sect of Buddhism, the largest sect of Buddhism in Japan.
I took a few pictures. And started my new series: Spiders on Tombstones. Granted, the spiders were tiny AND getting the camera to focus on them was very hard. I succeeded once and really it looks pretty cool.
We were in the temple after it closed, so we went out a different way than we came in and it was conveniently close to what has been reviewed as the tastiest Ramen in town.
I watched them eat.
When we got back to the hostel, Kellen retired for a nap while Ryan and I looked at the map. Exhausted at 7 pm, we decided to go out for a round or three so we could at least stay up until the respectable hour of 9 pm.
Which we did. Then we all crawled into our respective bunks and passed out. Rather I watched the pilot of Outlander and then fell asleep.
Day 1 in Japan, DOWN!