The Tourist-y Bit: Day Tripping in Kyoto

If you follow me on Instagram, you’d probably be thinking that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Kyoto. This is not the truth.

I recently visited Kyoto for a day-trip. Yup, you heard me, a day-trip.

And while my Instagram posting habits may seem as if I am still there, I am very much back in Nagoya, I just took a lot of photos on the one day I spent in Kyoto.

Anyway, now it’s time for a little review (or maybe summary will be a more suitable word) of my day trip to Kyoto.

So let’s take ourselves back to a Sunday morning, a rare one where I left my bed before 1PM (and 1PM is generous). In fact, I was actually in at Nagoya train station before 11AM, where we were taking the Shinkansen to Kyoto. We bought tickets on the day for non-reserved seats, a return ticket (that I nearly lost) costing us about 10,000¥ each and made our way to the platform to take whichever train came next.

And the trains were fairly frequent, so by 11.05 I was on the train posting to my Instagram Story, making sure that everyone knew I do actually leave the house for reasons other than work and getting drunk.

The journey itself is fairly quick (thank you Japan for your speedy Shinkansen), we arrived in about 35 minutes.

Onwards then, to the next part of our day, meeting my mum’s cousin in the station. However, we had a little while to spare before she was to arrive, so we headed into a department store and looked at the food section at the bottom, trying free samples of food that we were not planing on buying (though we did end up with some fancy popcorn).

When, after several FaceTime calls, we finally met my mums cousin, we took to her car and drove to a nearby restaurant. It must be said that with traffic and tourists, taking a car would never be my preferred method in a place like Kyoto however we soon made it into the restaurant. It was afterwards, however, that the fun truly began, as we headed to Teramachi and Shin Kyogoku, two parallel running shopping arcades.

It is now that I will disappoint the reader who is more interested in actual touristy action, as, while you’d expect that my plan to come to Kyoto would involve visiting Kiyomizu-dera or some actual, scenic spots (of which Kyoto has plenty), I was literally just planning on spending the day doing some good quality shopping, before meeting more family members for tea in an Izakaya.

So quality shopping time it was, though if you are interested in what other tourist attractions Kyoto has, I have been there enough times that I feel qualified to tell you that you will not be disappointed in any of them.

We wove through the large tourist crowds and expertly picked our way into some of Japan’s nicest souvenir shops. Yes, if you’re looking to buy gifts, Kyoto is surely the place to be.

And at some point during this, I stumbled across the gates of heaven, or the store front of a Shiba Inu Cafe.

This was literally my idea of heaven, so I absolutely had to get myself in there. There was a wait of about an hour for he next open session, so I paid my 800¥ and spent the next hour wandering around shops, unfocused, thinking only about dogs.

The dogs were pretty brilliant, though I’ve seen mixed reviews about people’s experiences of this Shiba Inu cafe, so I did go in with lowered expectations. Nonetheless I’d recommend this to any dog lover who has left their fur baby at home and needs some dog action.

Anyway I will be putting up a more focused review of just the cafe later, as it was just that important to my day.

After the cafe, I remained in a happy, blissed-out state so I mindlessly followed everyone while looking appreciatively at the photos I had taken of dogs, deciding which ones I would post to Instagram.

We found ourselves at Nishiki Market, a well known food market street, searching for some weird soap that my step-dad had bought my mum for her birthday and a particular shop that sold excellent umeboshis.

However, by this point it had started to get a little late so many of the shops had started to close (including our favourite umeboshi shop!) but thankfully we managed to get to the soap shop beforehand.

Obviously it goes without saying that this was some special soap, that had good qualities for your skin and was kind of jellyish in texture, and had beautiful packaging.

Next, we headed for dinner in a small izakaya,  where we ended up eating, chatting and drinking (the holy trinity) until it was time to catch the last Shinkansen back to Nagoya.