Kenzo and Angelica put on their kimonos and we headed to our hotel (shirts soaking wet as we had brought luggage) and then on to Osaka. Our attempt to find the festival was briefly thwarted by Angelica’s method of navigation which took us following the ladies in kimonos, of which there were many. She was also hard to follow as she is an Asian midget - things that help in the US but totally are destroyed in Japan! Our first attempt at navigation only got us to a Moss Burger in the middle of nowhere in Osaka. After a brief stop for ice cream (Raynor had a sore throat at this point, I’d been coughing/runny nose for the last few days) we got back on the train and found the real festival along with the open air arcades of Osaka. After eating some pineapple and taking a look around at the river, we ended up getting herded down a police line that cordoned off the street. Eventually, the main event began and a ton of men lifting a relic with two captains on top came by and pivoted and grunted in front of us with great enthusiasm. They circled around to us again before finally leaving. The rest of the night is a blur of pushing forward in crowded streets, eating messy Japanese pizza and trying to remove stickiness with ¥300 Pepsi condensation, running around and just missing fireworks or seeing their reflection in a skyscraper and collapsing exhaustedly in a coffee shop. What a rush.
The next day (the 26th) started bright and early at 12:30, complete with missing Super Hotel breakfast and any chance to visit the hotel’s onsen. We met up with Angelica and Kenzo and headed to their favorite conveyor sushi place which was cheap (¥2600 for 4 people), tasty, and had a little shinkansen train that would bring you your custom orders. We then headed for Kyoto’s famous Nijo castle, one of the largest castles still standing in Japan, after Himeji which was unfortunately closed for renovation at the time of our journey. Inside are the famous nightingale floors that “sing” when someone steps on them to prevent ninjas from attacking in the middle of the night. At the time before the Meiji restoration, the Emperor and the Shogun ruled Japan from Kyoto and the palace and castle. We wandered further through the castle grounds, meeting a guy who had just showed up from China. Unfortunately, the castle is the one place in Japan where you cannot find a drink or vending machine for long distances. After pressing all the buttons on one vending machine, I could only laugh sadly as a bunch of other tourists ran up and tried their luck. Finally we found another vending machine where the maintenance men were hanging out and I had my sweet, sweet cup of uezo juice. As we were leaving, we saw a museum with diagrams of the mural-building process used to build the walls of the castle as well as other artifacts recently unearthed from the area. Headed from the castle to a famous temple in the Kyoto foothills - Kiyomizu-dera. Again, Angelica used her haphazard method of navigation to guide us to a train station epically far from the actual temple. She claimed that the journey should refresh the spirit - well, we certainly had a long enough journey to do that! Wandered through plenty of shops, including one well-equipped Ghibli shop, and many false temples that proved not to be our destination. We also saw a) a man cleaning a car with a feather duster, b) several taxi drivers sleeping in their cars with the engines on, and c) many, many cicadas. The actual temple was absolutely stunning and well worth the wait, including the purification ritual. The substructure used to hold up the main bulk of the temple from the forest floor resembled a parking structure to my eyes, but I wasn’t one to go around mentioning my degradation of the holy temple to all the priests. I’m not sure what I actually wished for, but it may have been for good health. We took a bus back and grabbed some ramen near Angelica and Kenzo’s place. They gave us a ton for ¥950 - ramen, fried chicken, and rice! I see how Angelica and Kenzo survived the poor days when Kenzo didn’t have a job and they lived in a dorm room only slightly larger than my Towers room. We bade Angelica and Kenzo a final, fond farewell as they had work the next day. We also managed to accidentally stole their IOCOCA train cards as well (whoops!). I spent some time on the hotel computer (curse Japanese keyboard layouts with irrelevant keys next to the minaturized space bar!) and ended the day watching Japanese TV and finishing The Lost Fleet: Dauntless before going to sleep.
The next day (the 27th) marked an early start as we both wanted to grab breakfast and check out by 10. We stored our stuff at the hotel and headed around the neighborhood. After playing some shooter at the arcade, grabbing some boba, and failing to find Raynor a Japanese copy of Battle Royale, we headed back to the hotel to make our trip to Hiroshima. On the local subway we encountered a West Virginian man who had lived in Kyoto for 20-something years as an English teacher and recommended Japan as a nice place to get married. At the train station, I accidentally bought Raynor a Nozomi train ticket and thus had to pay an extra ¥3300 for the privilege of riding a train that I could’ve ridden for free 5 minutes later. That was pretty stupid. Made it to Hiroshima after meeting a half-Korean guy named Justin who just got done teaching English in Korea after graduation in 2009. He unfortunately stayed at a different hotel than we did (Reino Inn). We took the street car, like in San Francisco, to our hotel, wandered through the Peace Park and over to the dome and were quite touched before going to grab dinner at the Ristorante Mario, which, at ¥6400, was more expensive than our room but much more delicious with a silent waiter. We tried to go to another Italian restaurant but they didn’t speak any English or Italian even. Our hotel room did have a bunk bed though which was pretty awesome! Went to sleep 70% through The Lost Fleet: Fearless.