Kyoto Yo

In the morning we went down for our breakfast.  We had the same server as last time and he was wonderful.  Its always unusual as everyone bows deeply to you as you pass and arrive for meals.  First time last night being called Alex-Sama which is like a noble honorific instead of the usual San.  

We were on a light time crunch as I asked for a shuttle at 8:30, so we tried to eat quickly.  While less tricky than dinner there was a bowl of fried sardines, more roe that is tricky to get through without liquid, but overall fine food.  

After checkout the hostess took our picture in front of the hotel and we took off for the station.  I got a ticket to Nagoya and a ticket from there to Kyoto on the shinkansen.  We had to hang around about an hour and a half which was my bad.  The train to Nagoya took almost 2 hours and the shinkansen only takes 50 minutes, buuut... All the trains in and out of Nagoya on that line were stopped.  Apparently a fire was reported near/on the tracks and it took them an hour to verify it was safe again.

We made it to Kyoto just fine and took a taxi to the hotel.  Now I loved Kyoto last time and there were some areas I was happy to leave due to crowds.  Holy moly.  Our hotel is right in the thickest tourist area, which I knew.. But dang people snarfing food and drink walking by (typically a nono in Japan).  Our taxi has to wait for gawkers in front of the hotel to get out of the way while they stated at the taxi confused.  Big oof.  That's OK though.

The Park Hyatt Kyoto is luxurious.  It only has 70 rooms and is built to look at home in the area around old town Kyoto and surrounding temples.  Attached to it is a Michelin star tea house and restaraunt, and another restaurant with a view of the city and nearby pagoda.  

We had some champagne and sake while we checked in and then we were given the tour and shown our room.  Really beautiful place.  

We settled in with a little of wine, strawberries, and cake they'd given us as welcome gifts.  Another nice bath here and we put on the Sumo tourney for the day.  Big news was that Yokozuna Terunofuji officially backed out of the tournament and is retiring.  Poor guy has been in constant pain and has diabetes.  Other than that it's still an exciting tourney.

At 5 we had a reservation at the restaraunt Yasaka on the roof.  French/Japanese fusion teppanyaki and was our fancy meal for the trip.  We made ourselves look as pretty as possible, Sarah as gorgeous as ever and went up.  Teppanyaki is when the meals are cooked in front of you on a griddle.  They had timed the reservations such that we were there first as we had the full course and others came in 15-30 minutes later depending on their courses.

It was excellent and despite being fished out from the ryokan meals, the seafood here was still very enjoyable.

Also only 2/3 days since we now have had the best beef we've ever had... again.  Ohmi beef tenderloin.  Mine rare, Sarahs med rare.  Less fatty but man the tenderness melt in your mouth steak.  

YES, we told the hotel it was our honeymoon which is at least 25% true.  Which may have contributed to the wine and cake in our room and the chocolate pagoda with candles and white chocolate sign that said happy honeymoon, but

So anyways when they came out with the little chocolate pagoda and the chefs congratulated us, we blew out the candles and a few of the young gals at the end (Chinese or Hong Kong) folks at the end started singing happy birthday enthusiastically and we were like "No no! It's a honeymoon!"  To which she was like "oh nooo!" and covered her face.  Very funny good time.  10/10 would fiber about it being a honeymoon again.

When we left we got little gift boxes that had like croissant type things.  Sarah knows what they are but she's asleep and I won't edit this just for that

We have free breakfast the next couple days courtesy of reddit and a thing called Hyatt Guest of Honor awards so that's nice.  We picked the western breakfast as were sincerely Japanese breakfasted out, decidedly not their strong suit.

A side note is at the previous hotel some guest hadn't logged out of their Amazon prime video credo, so I started watching the movie American Fiction and it's very good so far.  Might finish it tonight on my own prime account if I don't fall asleep first.  Make sure to log out of hour netflix account and such if you use them at hotels!

Shishi on the right there is one of 2 Ukrainians in 2nd highest division

Gero gero!

Sad to leave Takayama but on to the next place.  We had to check out before 10 but had a little bit of time to kill.  We grabbed another hot chocolate and some small taiyaki (little pancake fish with filling)  

Our cheapo rubber galoshes were pretty much ruined the day before but luckily there wasn't much slush we'd have to walk through today.

We got to the station and got some assistance getting the tickets to Gero.  Gero is another Onsen town like Kusatsu, and one of "the big 3" most famous Japan Onsen towns.  The water here is alkaline, at the same level as milk or toothpaste, around ph 9 I think.  By comparison Kusatsu was highly acidic at ph 2.3 or so which is basically lemon juice.

Gero also has 2 other meanings in Japanese, one is "to puke/vomit" but they try not to focus on that one.  Gero gero is also the sound frogs make so they went with that as a town mascot.  There's very cute frog guys around.  We stopped at a frog shrine to pay our respects.  Its not that old, like 10 years, but its cute.  When you toss a coin in the box a motion sensor sets off a little fortune or saying from a speaker.  We tried to get a couple frog related snacks but the stores were either sold out or in the case of frog pudding closed.  We did get a couple frog souvenirs though.

We only had about an hour to look around as our hotel transport was coming to pick us up at the station at 3pm.  The town is filled with onsen hotels and ryokans and we opted for one that has a private bath in the room (Shougetsu).  We have never before been greeted by staff bowing and bring us to the most gorgeous hotel checkin seat for tea while we filled in our info and gave passports.  They luckily had an English speaking person to explain everything, although really not too much to it.  

Like the ryokan in Kusatsu we had dinner at a selected time where they also did turndown service for us.  I had selected a meal that was advertised as Hida beef on the website, thinking it was more centered around that (no info on what the meal actually was).  It was in fact their typical course which was very nice but had some difficulties for us :)  I managed to eat about half of my fish intestine in grated yam (with gold leaf on it).  I didn't know what it was beforehand but Sarah had translated the menu.  It wasn't that bad but my body involuntarily gagged on it and that scared Sarah off.  The shark liver wasn't too bad and I ate it all.  Urchine wasnt too bad.  First time for us trying Abalone which is quite expensive and regulated, and tasted crablike with an octopuslike mouthfeel.  There was less exotic stuff but again difficult for our palettes.  We got through just about everything though.  The meat was great amd the desert was the best honeydew pieces, orange I've had.  Forgot the name but a strawberry with red bean inside mochi was delicious.  Served with sweet sake.

Our server was an absolute delight though.  An excitable younger guy from Tokyo who spoke very good english but also was nice to carry on simple conversation with me in Japanese.  He was kind of flamboyant and genuinely felt happy to be with us and told us so.  Had a great time and Sarah and I had some good laughs as we powered through the food together.

After the meal we returned to our outdoor bath and we admired the view.  There's also a cedar bath I'm currently soaking my feet is as I write this.  Very nice and sauna like.  Not snowing but its still quite lovely here. 

Sold out of frog crepes :(

Check in at the hotel

Santera Mairi

We hit up the morning market again today but even more things in town were closed.  We did get a delicious hot chocolate drink though with strawberry bits and chocolate mochi in it.  Genuinely one of the best hot chocolates we've had.

We had a late lunchbat a ramen place that was just ok although the pork belly in it was very good.

After that we headed to the bus station and waited about an hour to head to a town north of here called Furukawa.  They have a festival every Jan 15 called Santera Mairi which is basically 3 Temple Pilgrimage.  It was started about 300 years ago for you folks to meet up, but now is now more praying for fortune in new relationships and thanking for old ones.  But girls do dress up in nice kimonos and have red parasoles and lanterns are lit and sent down the canal.  Additionally large snow sculptures around town shaped like candles are lit.  There's also lots of food stands.

It snowed pretty hard for a while and it was a chilly day.  The town is very cute in that historic section and has canals on the sides of roads that in the summer have carp in them (which they move in the winter).  We knew that's tuff was being lit but didn't know quite the logistics of it.  I think it really came down to we didn't stay late enough as the lanterns in the water probably happens later.  

There was this dude with a camera who asked us where we were from in english, but didn't know anything else.  And asked me something I though mightve been "why are you here" in Japanese.  And I replied we wanted to see Santera Mairi, and he's like "Follow me!"  And proceeded to sort of kidnap us as we backtracked to where we were before and somehow got some girl from Hong Kong involved.  A while later after he brought us to a temple where presumably it was starting, we thanked him amd then bailed.  Nice guy but it was awkward and he got us to take a photo with the Hong Kong girl who spoke perfect english btw.  Warned here we weren't sure what he was doing.

But everyone was super nice and wanted to talk at the stands.  I think its very unusual to get foreign visitors for this festival, and we saw very very few other westerners/nonasians there.  Lots of asking where we were from and how long we were in Japan.

I tried hot amazake which I had to look up later is a fermented rice drink that can sometimes be alcoholic.  It tasted kind of porridge like with a back taste of alcohol.  Wasn't crazy about it.

Ate more beef skewers and a croquette.  We also got pudding in a mayo shaped container that was more drinklike and happily not mayo flavored.

We also had Gohei Mochi which is a specialty of the region apparently.  Its mochi on a skewer that had a sweet and sour type coating instead of normal mochi/dango sweetness.  It had sort of a grey tar look to it before it was grilled.  Nutty tasting and slightly tangy.

We left a while after and although we missed more of the spectacle I'm glad we did.  Soooo tired right now.  Cooked, baths again, more cleaning of clothes.  I'll leave it at that for the night!