Kyoto - day 5

After a long bus ride, we arrived in Kyoto and were only wishing for one thing: to take a shower and get changed!! We took the metro to the bAKpAK Gion Hostel where we are staying three nights. We took a nice long shower, left our luggage and then headed out to explore the city. Our first stop was the Golden Pavilion, which turned out to be much further than we expected (Kyoto is bigger than it seems!). The pavilion was surrounded by a nice garden with ponds and it was nice to walk around there. Our next stop was the Nijo Castle, a rather impressive place with wooden floors that make bird sounds (instead of squeaky wood noises) to alert the Shogun of any intruders. Kyoto was even warmer than Tokyo and we spent a good part of the day walking, so by the time we finished visiting Nijo, we decided to head back to the hostel to take a nap and charge all the batteries. By the time we woke up, it was already dark and we were hungry, so we walked around the Pontocho area which is a nice alley with restaurants that cost our weekly budget... so we walked on until we found a cheap sushi-belt restaurant. It was delicious! (for real!) After dinner we walked around and went into a 5-floor casino/arcade/bowling alley. This place was amazing! We spent a lot of time just looking at everything. Everything is electronic, even the roulette table! We also saw a guy playing the equivalent of Guitar Hero on drums at a speed that was just unbelievable! And they also have electronic horse races where the people each have a seat with a screen and bet on a horse and they even pet it on the screen for some reason... They had lots more crazy games, but too many to describe here. We ended up playing Mario Kart against each other (Nat won!) and then two games of "air puck" (Pierre won). Then we walked back to our hostel, making a detour through Gion in an attempt to see a geisha... which we didn't see, but the walk was still nice. Back in our hostel we met some other backpackers from just about everywhere (USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, France, Norway...) and hung out on the rooftop lounge.











Weather: very very hot and humid... we've been attacked by an army of mosquitoes...