Kyoto

Kyoto is pretty cool. My uncle told us before we left it was designed after the Tang Dynasty capital Xi'an. I can't say I really see the similarity, but I'm sure things have changed a lot in the last 1200 years. On our first day here we went to 2.5 temples (Kiyomizu-dera, Kodai-ji--too cheap to go in, Chion-in) and the Nishiki market. It was raining for a good portion of the day so much of the beauty was diminished by the clouds and rain. At Chion-in there is a big bell. We looked around for the bell for a while before giving up and asking for help at the information desk. Unfortunately, they didn't understand English and couldn't see the picture of the bell we were pointing to (it was around the corner), so we got a pen and I wrote down bell in Chinese. This worked beautifully! Yes, I'm quite proud of myself. :)

For dinner we went to a tonkatsu place. They gave us what looked like barley in a bowl and as we were obviously confused, the waiter in a great wordless demonstration showed us we were supposed to grind up the grains and then add a sauce which we could then use with our tonkatsu. Brilliant, A+ work, grading on both clarity and humor.

We also stopped to peak in on an arcade. They have a lot of fighting games.