Kyoto!

The three of us weren’t originally supposed to sit together for the entire flight, but we lucked out when we checked in the day before and somehow found three available seats in the middle row!

After landing at Haneda we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto around 5pm. Unfortunately, we had a lot of mishaps getting to Kyoto – we struggled buying our train tickets on the kiosks, the website to buy tickets online would not load, the train was about an hour late (thanks mercury retrograde 🥲).

The most chaotic moment probably was after we managed to board and settled into the 4th car on the train we realized that car we’re in is for reserved seating. We tried to figure out which cars are for the non reserved tickets, based on what we found online, we thought it was the last three cars of the 16-car train. We hauled our luggage from Car 4 all the way to Car 15, only to discover that the non-reserved seats were actually in the first three cars. We were one car away the whole time 😭

We thought we can just try to settle in to a reserved seats while since the train is still moving but a conductor quickly found us and made us move. So we turned around walked back again while the train was moving full speed, it feels like we were in an uncharted game tbh.

We luckily made it to Kyoto in one piece and arrived at our Ryokan around 9pm

The next morning, we went to an amazing breakfast spot – Sokoku we lucked out because they’re only open on the weekend which worked out for our stay here.

In true Meghal fashion, we somehow ended up in a very nice ceramic shop 田村莱山

After that we went to Kiyomizu Dera for the Kiyomizu Seiryu Festival

We spotted some cute birds and tried our best to identify them using the Merlin app

Checkout those wooden beams!

Went to Gyukatsu for dinner

Angela took some random photos of me looking very focused & serious but me furrowing my brows just kind of makes me look like I have abs on my forehead 😭

I guess I probably did wish to “have abs” at one point in my life, but maybe I didn’t specify where it should go… Be careful what you wish for I guess.