Turning Japanese! Or at least starting to feel it...

Ohayo gozai-mass!

We've arrived safely in Japan! The flight went surprisingly quickly actually. We had a weirdo dish of grilled fish, pasta and shrimps for dinner on the plane, with the usual noodles, salad, roll and butter, crackers and cheese and an intriguing Japanese sweet (this time it was a ball of pink jelly-dough, rolled in icing sugar and filled with some weird sweet purple stuff). I watched Shark Tale and a Japanese film called University of Laughs (about some playwright and censor who go head to head over the approval of a play in WW2 Japan and end up becoming best mates and all that). I read some of my book, Memoirs of a Geisha (I finished Lovely Bones this morning) which is quite appropriate as it's set in Kyoto! Then before I knew it they were serving up the supper of ham and cheese croissants and we were soon due to land!

Once we arrived in Osaka-Kansai Airport it was all fairly smooth really, as pretty much everything was signposted in Roman characters as well as Japanese. We found an ATM which only let you withdraw a minimum of 10,000 Yen (which is 50 quid!), bought our train tickets then made our way to the JR station to get our train to Kyoto. The train pulled into the platform and they cleaned it before letting us on. We could see inside it and the chairs slowly rotated around to face the direction which the train was gonna go in! I thought that was pretty groovy. I also browsed the kiosk on the platform, and they had Chocolate Pockys on the shelves! (See post from Monday 28th March) I'll have to get some of those tomorrow!

Anyway, the walk from Kyoto station to the hostel was a death march with all the heavy bags I was carrying - felt like a right weary mule! The highlight was seeing a group of lads learning to breakdance on the street. How random! The hostel is really small but nice and cosy, bit like a house on four floors really.

Ok. So the plan for tomorrow is basically get up as early as possible to take in as much of Kyoto as we can. We've no food so we'll be eating out and we've no idea what's best to see while we're here, so when we check out in the morning we'll be asking the receptionist where to go to eat, what temples to see, where the hot outside spring baths are! We're staying in Osaka tomorrow night so we're aiming to get there around 5pm, have some tea then go out for karaoke! Then we'll be leaving the next morning for Good Ole Blighty!

I'll post again from the airport on Wednesday probably (cos it's free - haha!) and let you know what I've been up to in the Land of the Rising Sun. I'm going to go and get some sleep now so I can make the most of my day tomorrow!