RadioRoryTokyo at night. What can you say? Every neighborhood offers something different and a different kind of energy. Some are more “animated” than others.
And yes I did go to a karaoke bar. Some things are universal. I don’t like it at home and I wasn’t a fan of it here. It was probably a 50-50 mix of English and Japanese songs but I was too sober to enjoy any of it. That changed when I found an Irish pub playing “authentic music.”
Well, as authentic as it could be.
It was time to hop back on a bullet train. This time south and west to Kyoto. It takes just over an hour for the train to make the trip and the views are fantastic, including a 180-mile-an-hour drive-by of Mt. Fuji. They tell me it’s usually covered in clouds so I shouldn’t be too disappointed.
I got a great deal on a convention hotel located on the edge of Lake Biwa, just outside Kyoto. Odd place. First, they don’t explain that the train station that’s nearby isn’t the bullet train that you just came in on. Still, you check in at the train station and leave your luggage. It just isn’t the station that’s near the hotel. You have to hop on another train and then a bus to get to the front door. I envied the route my luggage took.
And the coffee shop doesn’t appear to be open in the early morning hours. Everyone is in the lobby waiting for the bus to the train station (No, not that train station, the other one) and you can’t get a cup of coffee. This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. They’re just trying to drive traffic to their upstairs overpriced buffet breakfast. At night, the top floor bar had a cover charge and was still expensive just for a beer or two. They served this alongside the beer (an Asahi)
Pink and white chocolates!?! I soon realized this place does a massive wedding business and it all starts to make a little more sense. Still, a deal’s a deal and I was making the best of it in my ridiculously over-sized room. Except to say….this is the shower.
The bathroom setup included a sink/vanity, a separate room for the toilet (at least it flushed and wasn’t a squatty potty). It also had a separate ROOM for the shower. The shower was the whole room with the tub on the side. It had a plastic stool in there too which didn’t scream “hygienic!” There was just a big drain in the floor in this four-star hotel.
The place was a real motivator to get me to go out and explore!