The train itself (once we had the Rail Pass settled and determined how to get our train tickets) was soothing and pleasant, and by that time (around 5pm), I was really tired. Then we managed to locate our ryokan, despite the gathering dark, thanks to the directions on the map we had been faxed. (Carrying our baggage the whole distance, however, was another story...)
The ryokan itself was small, but nice. The biggest surprise was being assigned to room Hiei (a name shared by both a local mountain and my favorite anime character). We fell asleep right away, after figuring out how to spread out the futon, but of course we woke up at around 1am and couldn't get back to sleep, so we took the opportunity to try a traditional Japanese bath.
Since the Tourist Information Center wasn't open yet, we wandered some more, winding up at Higashikonganji Temple, where we observed a few minutes of the morning service. When we were leaving, we were approached by several schoolchildren who apparently had an assignment to go up and speak to a foreigner in English. It was really cute. The girls did very well, but the boys seemed extremely shy around us, going through the whole "You say something... No, *you* say something..." routine.
We got a street map at the TIC and then spent the rest of the morning shopping along Kawaramachi Dori. We had the good fortune to stumble upon a manga (comic) store (although we had the clerks at their wits' end trying to find what we wanted based on our pronunciation).
Afterward, we stopped to pick up umbrellas. It was raining on and off the whole time. There wasn't really anything else we wanted to buy; everything was too expensive for us. We did, however, stop at a department store as it opened, so we got to see the whole staff lined up to bow as we walked in. (Imagine *that* at an American department store!)
Then we had lunch at a nice little place, where I wound up fighting with the lid of my miso soup until it fell into the bowl, splashing half of it on Jenn's backpack, the wall, and the floor. She will *never* let me forget this. We were still slightly jet lagged, so we went back to the ryokan and napped for a few hours, then stayed up and flipped through our purchases.
We went up the street to the Handicraft Center, where we each got a kimono and presents for family members. They had all kinds of neat crafts, beginning with handmade jewelry on the first floor and working up through paintings, clothes, pottery, and so on.
In the afternoon we went to Osaka for a brief visit. We had mastered taking the express trains and the buses, but the local trains still baffled us until we realized they were a lot like subways and we didn't need to purchase tickets for assigned seats. With our Rail Passes, we just had to get on and find a spot. The major drawback was that none of the trains were *labeled* "Osaka," that was just one of the stops on the way to their final destinations. We had no idea which train to get on until a man who spoke some English took note of our confusion and told us where to get on.
When we finally arrived, we visited Osaka Castle. It's very impressive from the outside, but once you climb all the way up the stone ramp and get inside, it's somewhat disappointing. The interior has been converted to a museum, and since we didn't speak any Japanese, we were reduced to pointing out various humorous points about the samurai armor.
Coming back, we accidentally took the wrong exit out of Kyoto Station, winding up on the south side rather than the north. It turned out well, though, because it allowed us to stumble upon a mall, where we had our first experience of ordering a meal by pointing to the restaurant's display of plastic food.
