I am extremely tired. Saturday I woke up at 7 am and did not go to bed before 7 am on Sunday morning, then slept all day, woke up around 7pm and of course had difficultly sleeping: I only slept two hours before waking up at 7am for class and here I am at 9:30pm working on my blog. I will go to bed early tonight.
The big day on Saturday however is justified. I went to yet another interesting trip to Kyoto, this time with 7 friends; 4 foreigners and 4 Japanese. The day started at Heian shrine, famous for it's secret garden, that I completely forgot about and thought it was quite an ordinary shrine! However, there was the biggest Torii gate I have ever seen before and cherry blossom had started, adding some beauty to the site. I indulged in some kanji writing in the pebbles of the Heian shrine court. I wrote "HANAMI" which means viewing the cherry blossoms.
We were supposed to head straight to the Silver pavilion, but the buses were so full (Kyoto is a very popular spot for foreign and local tourists during cherry blossoms) so we first went to Heian shrine. Still wanting to walk down the famous "Philosoper's walk" we managed to get crammed into a jammed-packed bus and we had a pleasant stroll and saw postcard-beautiful spots for hanami. After walking down the 2km path, we stopped to regain some energy at a little local restaurant where I had fried noodles.
We were then ready to climb up the Daimon-ji yama, a mountain famous for the enourmous "dai" kanji on it (chinese character for "great"). The character is lit on fire every year as part of traditional celebrations to scare away bad spirits. The climb was not too tiring, but we had to stop several times to catch our breath, the climb was fairly steep at some points. The climb was definitely worth it as we had one of the best views of Kyoto at the top. From the top we could see Kyoto tower and the gigantic Torii gate infront of Heian shrine (try to spot them on the photos).
Once we were back down we were all tired and ready to soak in the hot spring. For most of us it was our first experience... again, I did not feel comfortable taking photos so here is a link for a photo google search on Kurama Onsen: Photos.
After spending 30 minutes soaked in the extremely hot water, we headed back to hirakatashi for some Japanese-style partying: Karaoke! My first time since in Japan! This was a great place to spend the whole night: there were pool tables, darts, ping-pong and a comic-book viewing room as well. Although juice and softdrink was unlimited, we preferred sneaking in some alcohol and getting drunk on the spot.
Karaoke was so fun, everyone participated and I even tried singing two Japanese songs (terrible!) I was having too much fun to bother taking photos or videos, but we already decided to return, so next time I will try to post a video of my Karaoke-singer skills. The whole thing is so technologically advanced! You have an electronic touch-tone screen device to choose your songs from and the songs line up as we choose them. There are options to give scores on the performances. This was the most luxurious karaoke I have ever been to. We are also in private rooms, which is great.
Around 5 AM the Japanese were all dead tired and were sleeping in the karaoke room and I left with the last foreigner that was still there playing pool by himself, half falling asleep.
The staff obviously knew we had sneaked in beer but they did not say a word, they seemed to ignore it and the other Japanese customers (all around our age) did not seem to mind either.
I walked back to the dorms and went to bed around 7am...
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