Random Notes

Tonight will be the first night since.. how long? that I’ve spent the night in the same house/room as someone else. It’s very rare, since I don’t use shared dorms when I go travelling. I think the last time was with Ran in Banff back during Summer Connect 2020, then being in a tent while on a Jasper trip in 2019, and before that it would have probably been with Steffy when we went to Korea in 2015.

Here’s a Day 5 post-rainstorm morning picture of the house deconstruction near my place, since I won’t be there in the evening to witness what today’s (de)construction will do to it, if anything.

I met up with Zian at 10:33 at this morning (I was late as I was packing my actual backpack) and we set off for Kyoto Station on a bus from Nichioji Shijo together. There were ways to take the train all the way there from our local station, but “free” rides with our bus pass meant more value from the pass plus eliminating needing to take the Hankyu Kyoto Line and then the Kyoto City Subway Line or whatever.

For our first order of business, we took the JR Biwako Line from Kyoto Station to Kusatsu Station.

Zian, a far more organized planner than me, had found a really interesting nearby place for lunch from a tourist guidebook that she had borrowed from the Ritsumeikan library, of all things. That’s an amazing thing to think of using our library access for. Anyway, this shop was called Kobaya-Zakkokudo, and it (at least in the main area) featured long tables that were typically shared between two groups of people at the same time, and everyone sat on cushions on the floor.

We arrived around 12:00 pm and were told that there was room for us but that we had to leave by 12:45, so we didn’t order anything fancy for fear of them taking forever to make the food — there were basically three options with a few variations and both of us ordered the same thing in the end, some grated yam and konnyaku with rice.

The grated yam was very sticky and interesting. The meal was pretty great though, especially the miso soup that came with the meal — we both agreed that it was by far the best miso soup we’ve had so far (sorry, Ritsumeikan cafeteria…). It was the right balance of being really flavourful without being too salty.

We were out of the restaurant again by 12:30 pm or so. Next on the menu was an interesting old building complex that Zian had noticed while we were walking on the way to that restaurant — this was a place called the Kusatsu-Juku Honjin, and it turns out that there are 53 particular waystations on the southern road between Tokyo (Edo) and Kyoto that the daimyo and other lords would use while travelling between the two cities in the past before motor vehicles and the shinkansen. They were spaced out, in villages and such, with about a day’s worth of travel on foot between them. This was one of them, the 52nd of the 53 counting outwards from Tokyo. Apparently it’s still possible to go on a pilgrimage and visit most of these waystations. They were basically the equivalent of a 4-5 star hotel way back when!

Pictures weren’t allowed of the specific historical exhibits inside but some general pictures were allowed.

This is a urinal from the early Edo Period:

And a hot tub:

And one of the kitchen areas:

It was not a place I would have normally explored on my own, but it was very neat. I almost bought a souvenir and still kinda regret not doing so. After this, we went back to Kusatsu Station to check the timing for a bus that we would need to catch to get to a museum, the Lake Biya museum, that we both wanted to go to. We had about half an hour before that bus would come, so we wandered into the nearby little mall, went up a level and found a small store packed full of random things, likely second-hand stuff, though not all of it was second-hand. It really felt like rummaging through a garage sale, especially once we noticed random food and drink mixed in with the items as well:

We gawked, but didn’t buy. The bus came soon after — Google Maps didn’t even list a number for this local bus, but the one we took there was labelled bus number 60. But the one we took back later on, which was essentially the same route (but a very different bus), was bus 53. So do the numbers mean anything? Not sure.

This outgoing bus was very interesting though. For starters, it had three doors!

And a window mechanism that immediately made me reminisce about 90s Singapore!

And nice, wide windows, through which we could watch paddy rice fields roll by and take satisfactory pictures through:

We had spent a bit too much time in Kusatsu-Juku Honjin, earlier, and also took our own sweet time getting to the Lake Biwa Museum, and on top of that, I insisted on dragging Zian into the museum souvenir shop before we actually went to visit the exhibition halls, so by the time we started that portion of the museum experience, the time was nearly 4:00 pm, an hour before closing. We wandered the first exhibition hall together, before spitting up to cover more ground and be able to see what we individually wanted to look at the most. I visited a second exhibition hall, and then went down to an aquarium on the ground floor. The aquarium was split into two because part of it, a tunnel with fishtanks above and to the side that usually contained fish to make oneself feel like oneself was understand, was closed. Anyway, here are some generic pics of the Biwa Lake Museum/Aquarium visit,