Japan 2018: A Rainy Day in Kyoto

We woke up to a rainy day in Kyoto today. It was cooler, though, which was nice. The original plan had been to visit a shop specialising in tea ceremony sweets that we had visited 5 years ago & liked very much. Then we were going to visit the Nishijin Textile Center, which has a small museum,  exhibits about traditional textile crafts in Kyoto, & shops, which we've also visited before and wanted to see again. Then we'd take a taxi to a bamboo forest in a different part of Kyoto,and try to have a vegetarian lunch near a Buddhist temple, then visit an old traditional home that is open to the public. (Since many Buddhists are vegetarian, the most reliable place to find veggie food is on or near the grounds of Buddhist temples.) However, the rain made strolling through a bamboo forest a very damp prospect, so we decided to visit the sweets shop and Nishijin, then look for lunch in the subway station on the way home.

I started the day by doing a small load of laundry, and while it was in the dryer we went for breakfast at the subway station cafe that we ate at on Tuesday. I had a melon-pan-like pastry called "Maple Sunrise" which had a delicious lightly maple flavoured filling along with a milk tea. Charlie had a cranberry roll that was also really yummy.

On the way home we encountered a sign that I just had to get a photo of. This sort of creative English is absolutely everywhere, and always makes us giggle :)

After folding laundry, we went back out in the rain to catch a taxi to the sweets shop. Charlie showed the driver the address, written in Japanese in the guidebook, and the driver admitted that he probably could find it :) He did. The shop is called Shioyoshiken, has been in business since 1882, and is still owned and run by the family that started it. We visited the shop on a visit to Kyoto 5 years ago and it looks exactly the same as it did then.

There's a moderate selection of sweets available, but they are all amazingly delicious, and most are packaged in gorgeous boxes. We are bringing an assortment home with us :)

After burying our purchases deep in Charlie's backpack (the thought of delicate sweets encountering rain... shudder!) we put up the umbrella and walked down some narrow, narrow streets to the main street where the Nishijin Textile center is located.

Charlie had read online that they were having kimono fashion shows beginning at 10:00 am, so we got there in time for the 10 o'clock show. The kimono were amazing. Here are only three of the seven they showed:

After the show we did a bit of gift shopping in the shops, then went out with the umbrella ready, for a very damp walk to the subway station. Along the way we saw a tiny street shrine tucked between modern buildings. Once we got to the subway platform it was just 3 stops, on 2 different lines, to get back to the subway station near our hotel. There is an underground shopping "mall" there so we wandered around looking for lunch & decided to go to a soba noodle place.  I had cold soba noodles with dipping broth & tenpura & Charlie had hot soba noodles with rice and veggies. So good...

Then we got soggy again on the way back to the hotel. We had a very quiet afternoon, relaxing at the hotel and drinking tea occasionally thanks to the hotel's hot pot, teacups, & teabags, which were refreshed every day when they made up the room.

The rain just kept coming down, so we decided our best bet for dinner was the top floor of the Takashimaya department store (where the Pokemon Center is located). We could walk there through the covered Teramachidori to stay dry most of the way. It's a little over 1 km each way, so good exercise too :) As usual with Japanese department stores, the top floor is dedicated to restaurants and food courts. We looked around a bit and decided on a family restaurant with a varied menu. Lunch had been a lot of food for me (as you may recall, our lunches have been thin on the ground these past few days) so I was happy to have a Kitsune Udon soup set (Kitsune udon is thick wheat noodles in broth, with a big slab of aburage- sweetened & fried tofu) that included 2 little inari sushi (which is rice that's wrapped in aburage to look like foxes' ears). Charlie had beef stew. It was all delicious!

This evening we repacked our luggage to incorporate the omiyage gifts that we've bought in Kyoto to bring home. Tomorrow we take the shinkansen back to Tokyo at noonish. I'm looking forward to more station bento! And thankfully, we have fun things to look forward to this weekend, otherwise, leaving Kyoto would be nearly unbearable. We've had just the best time, and I've been promising myself we'll come back again.