Naked Day!

Thursday...Moved house
Friday.........Saw castle
Saturday.....Bathed with naked Japanese men

Other than that, fairly routine 3 days in and around Kyoto.
Thursday then. We left the cold darkness that was Gojo guest house and moved across town to the sunnier climate of Costa del Sol Kyoto. Nice clean room and the best futon yet! After dumping our stuff off, we went for a look at Kyoto tower and Kyoto train station (pictured here). Obviously we'd passed through the station at various times, but not had a proper look at it. It seems weird to go see a station, but it's an amazing looking building. It's like a futuristic cathedral and you can take the escalator up to the 11th floor to get a good look at the building and a nice view of Kyoto to. The station is full of windows with mirrored glass making it look more massive than it already is and giving you lots of photo opportunities. In the picture you can see Kyoto tower reflected in the windows. We went up the tower which is 130m high, something like that and to my great delight my vertigo seems to be going! I think it's cause we've been going up lots of high buildings, Sydney bridge C'mon! The tower was ok, nice views of Kyoto and all that, which reminds me. It's amazing how many jobs there are in Japan. I'm sure there must be unemployed people, because you can't believe how many people they can get to do a simple job. When we went up the skyscraper in Tokyo there were at least 5 people just to show us the way to the lift! In Kyoto tower, there was a girl operating the lift for you! Is that the most boring job in the world??

Friday: Day trip to see Himeji-jo, Japan's most impressive castle by all accounts. And it was. Awesome. It's really hard finding new words to describe how spectacular things are in Japan, so please forgive my illiterate brain (can't spell either). Himeji castle was built in 1580 and was captured by our old friend Ieyasu Tokugawa 30 years later.
You arrive at Himeji and as soon as you come out of the station you can see the castle down the road. It takes about 10 minutes to walk down the road, walk over the bridge over the moat and then you're there. It's called the 'White Egret', I'm guessing cause it's white... And indeed from a distance it does indeed look like a, er, massive, white castle.. Anyway it was easily the most splendid (new word) castle these eyes have ever gazed upon! Also it's intact, it escaped bombing in ww2 and also to escape wras generally over the last 400 years makes it a pretty rare find. When you get up close to the keep it's size is unbelievable to and you can wonder all through the building, right up to the 6th floor at the top and gaze out on Himeji city. If you look closely you can see Sam at the foot of the Keep, giving you a bit of scale! Lots of Lone wolf goings on again as you would expect in such a place. What I was especially interested to see was the suicide area. Brought back images from Samurai Executioner as well. There was a wooden platform where the person performing suicide would sit. Other samurai would sit along side to watch as well and also the Second who would cut the head off the chap once he had made the belly cut, so as to end the suffering quickly. There was a well nearby too, so that water could be drawn firstly to wash the sword, so purifying it and secondly to wash the head after it had been cut off. Lovely stuff! All in all a brilliant day out, although the 20 quid each train fare was slightly more than we wanted to pay. We spent the evening at the Irish bar in Gion, Kyoto enjoying, er, beer and fish and chips :) After almost a month of admittedly gorgeous Japanese food, we both just needed some English food. Also the owner, Michael, told us of a Japanese bath he recommended we try on our last day in Kyoto.

Saturday: Our last full day in Kyoto, we went and saw a couple of temples as you do. One was boring (Nanzen-ji) and the other, the Silver Pavilion was very nice. Well it had a nice garden anyway, very Zen :) No silver on the pavilion though, odd. After the temples we headed off to the Japanese bath. The baths we went to were in Kurama, which is just a little north of Kyoto. Took us about 1/2 hour or so on the train. They have hot springs which are outside, so you get a bit of a view of the surrounding trees, mountains and the valley you are in. I should say at this point that the baths are sex segregated and that there are no naked photos, good or bad I'll leave that to your judgment :)

So we paid our 1100 Yen (5 pound) and in we went. I was a bit nervous obviously, it's not every day you get naked with a bunch of fellas and theres the bath etiquette to observe. You go in, get undressed, keep your towel round you, and go and go for a shower first. You have to sit on what is basically a potty in a line and soap yourself down (calm yourselves ladies). I wasn't really sure how thoroughly to wash and so kept an eye on the bloke next to me, who seemed to be soaping himself down like he hadn't washed for a year. I carried on until another fella sat down and had washed in about 1/2 a minute. I washed the soap off and went round the corner to the bath. It had about 8-10 people in it and a couple of kids. I found a corner and slipped myself in to a lovely hot bath. Then you just sit there, lie there, whatever you want, relax and watch the scenery, very nice indeed. We spent about an hour in the bath and then emerged very relaxed indeed, in fact we both fell asleep on the train coming back.
That was the last few days then and we're heading off to Nikko today on the shinkansen for a couple of nights. We are staying at somewhere called the Koryu Sokushin Center, which looks nice and we think has beds....mmmm, which will make a change from futon.
Tuesday we will be heading back to Tokyo for our last 2 nights and then we fly to Vietnam on the 16th! Sun, sun sun :)