The Nishiki Market in Kyoto is part-wet market, part-street food paradise. The perfect place, in my opinion, to walk up and down around lunchtime to take little bites of everything and explore.
abalone
fresh hotate (scallops)
lightly caramelized sweet potatoes. perfectly crunchy on the outside,super soft on the inside.
soft shell turtle sadness : (
Perpendicular to Nishiki is the Shinyogoku-dori shopping district, which is pure awesomesauce.
Chicago Harajuku Thrift Store
super cute shop
Urban Research
Kitano Shop
this little aquarium of axolotls stood in front of an arcade for some reason
still not entirely sure why, but loooooooook at them! i’ve always wanted one.
Kyoto Station
chestnut mont blanc
mom had steak while my brother and i went for chirashi
after lunch we took a walk to this garden nearby. you had to pay Y500 to get in and i can’t recall its name, but it was completely beautiful. we didn’t think we would reach the cherry blossoms in time for our trip, but when we got there they had just started to bloom.
gay picture is gay, i know. they smelled really sweet though.
around this time i started noticing that i felt kind of disoriented, and developed a dull sort of headache which i quickly brushed off. we started getting one or two random text messages asking if we were okay because an earthquake had just hit the japan. now if you know anything about filipinos, you’ll know that tiny things (unfailingly) like to send us into a text-sending frenzy, so we brushed those off as well.
sat down at a UCC and everyone seemed completely calm, so we didn’t think that anything was out of the ordinary.
cafe latte with ichigo cream
sakura (cherry blossom) cream waffle
it wasn’t until we got back to our hotel that the scale of the earthquake started to dawn on us. the tv in the lobby was on and the first thing i remember seeing was a massive amount of water with these giant steamer ships in it that sat on top of where it looked like buildings used to be. a couple of panicked looking foreigners had gathered in the lobby and were presumably busy tweeting/texting frantically. we didn’t have time to really absorb everything because we had to catch the 4pm train back to osaka. when we got there that night and turned on the tv it was really heartbreaking to see how much damage was inflicted on the north east of japan, especially on Sendai.
we were really lucky that because of where we were when it happened, we didn’t feel a thing. some people that we talked to in both kyoto and osaka even said that their buildings started swaying. i really can’t stress enough how much i respect the japanese for the way they conducted themselves in the face of such a terrible thing, and for how determined they are to rebuild everything after the earthquake. being able to visit all these little towns throughout our trip helped me see how much of a loss it really is for them not just in terms of the human casualties, but also culturally; losing these places that, however rural or far away, the japanese people have really taken so much painstaking effort to preserve. : (
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