An eating oasis, and our first time to Kyoto

Nick checked in the tour guide and discovered that our hotel had a ‘restaurant-row’ attached to it, which was accessed through the basement levels. We headed down to B1 and found what amounted to an underground city, with tunnels to the subway and a series of restaurants and shops, most notably the mini-complex called HiHi Town. This place became an oasis for us. And Monday was our first stop when we hit it for lunch. All I can say is if we hadn’t found HiHi Town we would have had a much less positive experience in Osaka. But through HiHi Town we found an Udon/Soba place that had fantastic lunch, with noodle bowls, rice, small sushi rolls, etc. It was fantastic.



Kyoto desu...
We then made our first trip to Kyoto which proved to be a very cool town. It’s only about a 15 minute ride on the Shinkansen so we went up after lunch which got us there at around 2pm.



There’s a tall pagoda within view of the train coming in, so that seemed like the best place to start our exploration. We walked over and it turned out to be a Buddhist complex with some interesting shrines and statues.

After taking a lot of pictures, Nick suggested heading up to the Imperial Palace. The subways in Japanese towns are really simple to get around on, so we headed up to the palace grounds and got there at about 4pm. Unfortunately it was getting a little rainy so we took a few pictures but then called it a day and headed back to Osaka. We planned on returning to Kyoto, which we did on Wednesday, to give ourselves some more time to check out this really cool city.