JAPAN: LIKE EPCOT, BUT REAL!

Last weekend I had the fortuitous pleasure to be able to spend a whopping 36 hours in Kyoto, Japan. It's one of the many perks of living in Korea - an hour-and-a-half-long flight from Seoul and BAM, I'm in another country. And not even some "shithole" country (yep, I went there), but legitimately one of the places I'd been dreaming about since I was a child.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that my childhood dream destinations were China and Japan, since I have in no way ever fallen into the "typical" child category. When I was obscenely young, probably 4 or 5, I became randomly obsessed with the China and Japan pavilions at EPCOT Center at Disney World. I didn't want to be a princess, or go to Paris, or have a pony - I just wanted to go to Asia. It didn't help that in MY FAVORITE Reading Rainbow episode that LaVar went to Japan, and it was dreamy and wonderful and perfect. (My second favorite episode is where he makes paper out of jeans...) Somewhere in my parents' house I'm sure they still have my child-sized kimono (with professionally matched obi belt courtesy of the nice lady at Japan EPCOT).

Well, 36 years later, I made my dream come true. I bought a ticket on a discount and entirely magenta Japanese airline to leave at 7:30am on a Saturday and return at 9pm the following evening (shout out to Peach Airlines, the Southwest of Japan). Pumped with adrenaline and the fact that the sun is FULLY UP at 5am in Korea, I was rearing to go. As we landed at 9:10am in Osaka, I was ready to walk the (spoiler alert) 28,145 steps of that Saturday all around Japan.

Thing one I noticed about Japan: it is chaotic. Even just reading the signs at the airport. They're colorful and taking up EVERY SURFACE, so you don't know where to look - oh, and they're all in Japanese. You laugh, but coming from Korea, where I am able to at least read the language (whether or not I actually know what it means), it was a little shocking to be surrounded by a language I couldn't even begin to phonetically butcher looking at its characters. There was some English, which sent me to the train ticket place, but anyone with any kind of travel anxiety might have simply melted into a puddle on the floor. 

I wanted to take the bullet train because OF COURSE, but the bullet train didn't have this adorable ticket option:

So I took the hour-ish train from Osaka to Kyoto Station, using the on-train WiFi to catch up on episodes of My Favorite Murder (as you do). When I arrived at Kyoto Station, I hadn't eaten in nearly six hours, which is unheard of for me, so I stopped at one of the TEN ramen restaurants inside the station and had a wonderful bowl of the most satisfying miso ramen.

I used the age-old "point and nod" since my Japanese is limited to "thank you" (which I learned from Mr. Roboto). Thank god for photographs of food on menus. It tasted like delicious salty, pork-y heaven, and was exactly what I needed before my half marathon walk ahead of me.

My first touristy trek, since it was only 11am, was the Fushimi Inari shrine - better known as "that place with all the orange gates that people post on Instagram." It was an easy two-stop train ride south of the station. Apparently everyone else had the same idea - Instagram makes you believe that it's deserted and quiet, but it's packed to the brim with tourists from all over the world, as well as some Japanese school kids in their cute little uniforms.

The whole place is covered in statues of foxes - apparently the foxes are some kind of messengers and so all the little stores have little white fox souvenirs. They're pretty cute, actually. You can see them in front of all the buildings (above) and randomly along the walk up the mountain.

The torii (orange gates) are actually all the way up this huge hill (mountain?) so while I thought I'd never get my perfect "abandoned" Instagram shot because of all the tourists, it did start to thin out the further up the hill I got. There's something magical about being at a place that is hundreds of years old - I believe the most recent reconstruction dated back to the 1600s-  and Kyoto is pretty much entirely that. Since the Japanese were almost never attacked on their own soil, all the historical sites have literally remained untouched for hundreds of years. In comparison, poor Korea has had most of their historical sites and buildings either destroyed and rebuilt, or "repurposed" during occupation by China or *ahem* Japan.

Part of my 28,000 steps was this whole damned hill that just kept going, but it was beautiful. I did finally get my solitary Fushimi Inari photo sans other tourists:

*Instagram perfection*

Once you make it to the top of the hill, the orange torii stop and you start walking down past a ton of shrines (that I found out later were GRAVEYARDS, YIKES). But because Japan is wonderful, and you should never hike without hydration, randomly along the path down the hill were vending machines. Full. Of. Green. Tea. My joy was palpable because OH GOD I LOVE JAPANESE TEA. And let's get real here for a second - Korea doesn't have good tea. It's all weird barley or corn or some other grain tea, and it's NOT GOOD. But rejoice! Every few hundred feet would be one of these:

That's my favorite brand - I have gotten it for years, and here it is at ¥150, or LESS THAN $1.50. In Korea I can find it at ONE PLACE for $2.50. Also look, MINI SIZES!

And if that wasn't enough to make my whole entire visit complete, it was lunch time for the adorable shrine kitties:

Speaking of kitties, there was another shrine kitty up on the hill by the torii, who sat off the path about six feet and just yelled at everyone passing by, like "HEY WHAT UP, TOURIST." I, of course, was like "HIIII KITTYYYY" and the people passing me thought I was nuts, but whatever.

Somewhere along the hill I hit 10,000 steps, something I usually do around 8pm on a normal day (or if it was before I moved to Korea, oh, about NEVER o'clock), and it was only noon. I got myself a little hangy thing and my friend a magnet (I GOT YOU SARA) and headed back to the train station for what will become Part II of the Japan Saga.