Up somewhat early again, early enough that we find it difficult to find anything open any way. So we walk until our trusty 7/11 or Lawson's shows up and we dive in for food and drinks. Food is consistently good, but we struggle to find a place to place to sit and eat. We finally commandeer a bench outside a closed office. It'll do fine.
From there we decide to just taxi to Shariden Kinkaku, the golden temple.
Spectacular temple and sites. Also very crowded. Seems like it was field trip day in Kyoto and all the busses are right here with us :) . We decided to taxi again (yeah, seems so easy and we're getting so lazy and tired at this point) to the next stop, Imamiya Jinja Shrine.
Then a taxi (ouch... sounds a lot worse typing this out) to a market. And man do I mean a market! I think down the main hall, I could see the curvature of the earth! This place had everything, and I do mean everything.
After lots of exploring, we end up splitting up. I grab some tempura shrimp at the market and eat before heading to a brewery that was to be our reconvene point. I rest and drink some good local beer while I wait on the girls. Eventually we all gather and decide to split up again. Madison and Bailley going to a knife shop and Abigail and I going to the Kyoto Museum. We start the 2 mile walk back after the museum, but eventually ditched about a mile in and, shocker, called a taxi. Madison and Bailley weren't far behind and oddly, did a similar attempt to walk then ditch strategy.
We/I nap a bit and rest, before deciding to use our second wind to hit on of the most instagram famous sites, Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine. It was dusk and starting to drizzle when we got there. Was it crowded? Yes, but I'm sure not nearly as bad as during the day. Did the mist/drizzle make it seem more mystical? Oh definitely so.
Spectacular shrine and the gates didn't disappoint. It's basically a hike up a mountain and the path is lined with torii gates. Oh, PSA: This waiting for crowds of people to stop while someone takes 20 pictures each of 5 different poses, THEN SWAPS WITH THEIR PARTNER TO REPEAT has got to stop for the good of all humanity, please!
We are about at the midway point and it's basically light rain now and dark. At that point we were discussing keeping going to the top or starting the walk down. When all of a sudden this big Italian family comes scurrying by us, almost running and even pushing us. I think to myself, "Americans have the bad rep, but look here, that's just uncalled for!" when the last older gentlemen scurries by and he looks me in the eye and says "bear". Umm, ok, very scurry worthy! I grab Madison and pull her closer to us and we make a hasty retreat back to the main area. So, basically, we narrowly avoided a bear attack... whew!
It's raining now, so we look for the first place we see where we can get out of the rain. Huh, a metro station. Wow, I guess we haven't been trying very hard with public transit in Kyoto LOL.
We take the metro back north and pop up to look for food and a pharmacy (normal vacation stuff for us it seems). We ducked into a place and had ramen and gyoza. No metro runs east enough for the ryokan (I at least looked this time), so we taxied back for our second and final collapse of the day!
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