Kyoto: Day 19

We didn’t do too much today since it was hot. We basically just walked around Teramachi during the day and then went to the manga museum. I was surprised to see that the video games were right. In Japan they really do have giant enemy crabs.

And angry stores called Angers.

We headed back to the hostel to drop off my backpack because it was so hot. On the way I took a shot of the river during the day.

We left for the manga museum and I saw a new GTR in the wild! I guess they are out in Japan. That is exciting. The driver noticed I was taking a picture of his car and I waved, he smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.


We finally made it to the manga museum (it was a long walk).

The place was really cool. First off, the entire lawn was filled with people reading mana, which I thought was neat. Then, the whole place was like a library of old and rare manga. You could just grab something off of a shelf or display and read it. Quite a cool concept, I bet a lot of people go and just spend the day reading manga. Also, while we were there I got a caricature done. One problem though, it sucked. Erin said that my old drawings were better. The worst part is that the other person drawing had awesome, awesome looking caricatures but was busy with a couple at the time. The guy we got was just bad, it was disappointing, especially because I had to pay for it. They did, however, have a cool café.

Funny navel building


For dinner we stayed in at the hostel and Yashi cooked for the 10 of us guests that were staying there. Well, Yashi provided the means and the ingredients and then showed us how to cook what we were making. Oh yeah, we were making たこやき (takoyaki) or fried octopus. We had this really cool takoyaki maker sitting in the middle of the table. How it worked was simple; you poured batter around the maker and then dropped a piece of octopus into each of the holes. Then you added ingredients like lettuce, pickled ginger and whatever else. The next step was spinning around the batter in each of their little holes so that it rolled into a ball. That was the fun part but was a bit tricky. It was involving for everyone. Cooking dinner with everyone at the hostel was a lot of fun. After eating all of the takoyaki (we made several rounds) we just sat around and talked. We had some good conversations talking about cultural differences and telling about our own countries. I pretty much love this hostel, it has such a great atmosphere, which is all thanks to Yashi, he is really cool.

After that we hung out for a bit and then went to bed. Oh yeah, we also made arrangements to go to Nara tomorrow with some of the other people staying at the hostel. I am sure it will be fun.