Ice cucumber sign, Ohara.
It's our last night on the mainland, at least until we fly out of Tokyo next week. Tomorrow we go to Okinawa, and while I'm so sad the first part of our trip is over--it really has been incredible--we're looking forward to some good family time and a slightly less breakneck pace. I am sure Osaka has its charms, but we are just too tired to look for them tonight.
Kyoto was great, clean and happy. Sunday was a little misadventurous, with a terrifying two-hour bike ride on increasingly narrower streets up to a monkey park that turned out to be really kind of gross. You can feed the monkeys out of your hand, and at first it's amazing. Their hands are so quick! Their eyes are so intelligent! But then you realize it's not intelligence so much as crafty greed, and they fight a lot and smell like monkey shit, and it's just kind of...icky. If I had to do it over again, that's not how I would spend my one full day in Kyoto. At least the scenery was pretty and the bikes were fun once we figured out the traffic. I always sniffed at the electric-assist bikes, but they're great, especially at full power. I kind of want one.
It's hard to write for very long on an iPhone and I have to pack, so I'll save the rest of the stories for another time. Oh! I ate fugu and raw chicken both on the same day and did not die. Not even a little bit.