Final Morning in Kyoto

This is Akira.

Super nice Airbnb host. This was the last morning I spent with him, and on the way back from buying breakfast again, he stopped by the Shogun Park viewpoint (aka my Higashiyama Unstained Court) again so that I could “say goodbye to Kyoto”.

He also took a picture of me, and I am not used to seeing my adaptive lens glasses that get dark in sunlight, since it isn’t dark for me looking out at the world through them. Both the old and new omamori amulets from Yasaka Shrine are visible hanging off my bag, too.

Breakfast this morning was another bento box and bun,  the bento box visible here

And the buns here:

The first picture had a picture of Akira‘s breakfast bun (with fish and onions) instead of mine, but he swapped it back before any harm was done to either of the buns. He insisted I get another bun to eat while walking around the market later, so I picked up that bear bun in the bottom left plastic bag. As Kynji requested in Discord, I bit off its nose before eating the rest of it later on. Poor thing.

Here’s a picture of some snacks, as an example of the things that Akira tried to give me through the entire stay there:

Nuts, crackers, cookies, he tried them all, leaving them enticingly on the kitchen table after making me try a couple of them, but I’m not really a snack person and I don’t like to impose anyway so I never helped myself to them. I did consume several cups of his tea though, since he always insisted I drank something with breakfast or (when we brought bento boxes home) dinner. To partially get around this, when he offered me a drink during Day 20’s breakfast, I picked up a 5-pack of Yakult and had that for Day 20’s breakfast and dinner, Day 21’s breakfast and dinner, and this last day’s breakfast too.

I did like the tea though, and I was also amused that he used chopsticks to stuff the tea bag inside the cup and stir it around and then again to remove it afterwards. For whatever reason I’ve never thought of using chopsticks when making tea. I suspect it goes against the elegance and principles of things like the Japanese tea ceremony.

This stay was definitely an interesting and neat experience. Despite running on someone else’s clock, which took away some of my freedom to explore and wander, it also gave me other experiences and chances I’d never have had. So it wasn’t necessarily better or worse in the end, but different, an interlude of sorts to the trip. I definitely fell behind in blog-writing on this leg of the trip and I’m not sure I’ll be able to catch up before I get home though, since I’m not going to compromise on what I want to write for each day in order to get it out faster, but at this point I only have two more weeks left anyway, and being three days behind or so isn’t the worst thing.

After breakfast, he took me to the Heian Raku Ichi Market again, in Okazaki Park, next to the Heian Shrine there. I was going to tell him to just drop me off, baggage and all, and I’d make my own way to the train station afterwards, but he said that he was going to do some shopping nearby and would meet me here in his car in an hour and drive me back to Kyoto Station, and I could then take a shinkansen from there to Osaka.

I didn’t take many pictures nor buy anything from here, but I did spend the hour walking around and browsing all the stalls. There were only about maybe half a dozen stalls selling food or drink out of the 200 or so here, since this was mostly a handicrafts market, with clothes, figurines, postcards, furniture, bags, toys, and more all on sale. I almost bought a water bottle bag to act as a new carry bag for Tigey but the bag I was eyeing was a little too small and the stall owner didn’t have a larger version of that particular pattern (but had larger versions of other ones). Oh well.

I also stopped by the Heian Shrine briefly,

But their goshuin were pasted on ones and I was low on time by this point anyway so I neither wandered into the shrine proper nor bought one of them. I hopped back into Akira‘s car one last time, he took me to our usual pick-up spot near JR Kyoto Station, and we said our goodbyes there.