Kyoto, March 21:

I woke up, but I had a really weird sleep. First off, my sister and I were watching Young Sheldon in our hotel room but I fell asleep with my glasses on and woke up to 4:00 am to see clearly and my sister talking to her friend back in the States.

Our first place to go in our Kyoto agenda was a famous bamboo park. In this bamboo park there were many things to see and many things to eat as well. We got many pictures of the trees and I ate these yam balls dipped in sweet soy sauce, now it was a very interesting taste. I’m not saying I hate it, I just wasn’t used to eating something super sweet like that and being punched in the throat afterwards with what tasted like salt.

Afterwards, our guide took us to another park where the Kinkakuji (translates to Golden Pavilion) is located. I really enjoyed this park, there were many traditional places and foods there. It was also an hour long hike to explore the whole area that surrounded the Kinkakuji. The golden temple is absolutely stunning, when the sun shone on it, it glistened. The park had other things to look at as well, there were many places such as small ponds that were used for tea ceremonies. Or statutes in ponds that represent something.

It really was such a nice hike though, I remember getting some free samples as well along the way. Like matcha and cherry blossom rice balls, (which are super good). On our walk we found some food and ice cream to eat during the free time given to us from our tour guide. We found a small cafe selling these cheese dogs? It’s literally cheese with melted cheese inside, or maybe it was some sort of bread or starch? Whatever it was, it was pretty tasty. We also got ourselves some fried chicken, and I didn’t realize this about Japan but they really love fried chicken there. In fact, it was easier to get fried chicken than sushi for us. We had a pretty hard time in Japan finding a sushi restaurant close to us or not with a bar. Anyway back to our lunch, I also got a white peach and strawberry sorbet, it was really good but I’m not really a fan of sorbets. We ordered some fries as well to share, and they were noodle flavor, which I didn’t know was a flavor but hey it was good.

You won’t believe it but after this hike and lunch we headed towards another temple in downtown Kyoto. There we would be able to shop for some time and find some things that we wanted to take home. Other than that, we had a chill day and we started to head towards Osaka which was like an hour or something away. We reached our hotel pretty late, and by then I was so tired I fell asleep and forgot to eat dinner.

Our day in Osaka was really fun, we went to one of the most famous marketplaces or mall out there! Stay tuned.