Goodbye Kyoto

We went and saw the Golden Temple yesterday. Afterwards, Sensei met up with a longtime friend who lives in Japan. The rest of us did some shopping and split up for dinner. We will have a picture up later, but the kids bought a pitcher sized parfait and ate it all. Dinner was at a Ton Katsu restaurant (fried breaded pork cutlet), a Shabu Shabu restaurant (thinly sliced beef cooked in boiling water) and Sensei and her friend enjoyed Yakiniku (meat strips that you grill yourself table side). Some of the group tried to do karaoke at night, but it took a while to realize the person at the Karaoke place was saying that they were all full. Perhaps we will have a great karaoke experience in Tokyo.

This morning we split into two groups. The first group went shopping at some Kyoto stores by the Train Station while the rest of the group went to an Onsen (an elaborate Japanese bath house). Sensei is an expert on Onsen and even wrote a book about many of the Onsen in the northern part of the main island of Japan. She has a rating system and ranks them from 1 to 5 stars with one exception where she gave 6 stars. This morning the onsen we visited gets 5 stars from Sensei. They had cold soaking tubs, hot soaking tubs, really hot soaking tubs, tubs with strong water jets, mineral water tubs, a tub that shocks you with electricity and outside tubs. There were also three types of sauna. It was so relaxing.

We met back at the hotel and went to the Shinkansen (bullet train) and are on it headed to Tokyo. We had a small hiccup and had to board a later train than planned and so we are sitting in the non-reserved cars, but all's well that ends well.