WOO 100th post! As a way to celebrate, i’m making this post extra special, lots of eye candy, lots of adventure and a little surprise at the end (I feel there should be a “that’s what she said” joke there…).  Anyway, on with the post!

So the other day I was invited by my buddy Frank to meet him and a few friends at Kyoto.  Objective: Arashiyama!

Arashiyama is a mountain (“yama” = “mountain” - i expect you to all be fluent by the time i’m home), and is famous for the monkeys that inhabit it.  But we’ll get there eventually, things happened before the monkeys!

So Frank + posse were out in Kyoto the night before, clubbing, drinking, talking to transvestites and even being kidnapped by an extremely “cool” Korean guy.  Now I wish I was there, but I wasn’t =’(

But so I was to meet them in the morning.  Frank said they’d try to get out early, like REALLY early – 6am.  I agreed to meet them in Kyoto at that time, but knew that i’d need to leave at around 5am to be there in time, which meant i’d have to be awake at around 4am (well.. 4am+snooze).  And so I DID! I woke up at 4, got ready, 5am came around, i gathered my shit and went down stairs.  Hopped on my pretty pink bike and rode off for Makino station (there were no buses to take me to Hirakata station at that hour). But just as I left, I got a message from Frank.  They… hadn’t gone to sleep yet… they were still up and drinkin… He said to meet them at 9.

Bugger.

Oh well, I went back home, slept a bit more, watched some Heroes episodes and did a test run of filming the sunrise outside my balcony – it went well.  I knicked off again at 8am, but this time the buses were awake! So I caught a bus to Hirakata Station.  From Hirakata Station I had to go to Tambabashi station, not to be confused with Temmabashi station which is in the complete opposite direction – which is exactly what i did.

In case you can’t read the little yellow things, they read (left to right) Temmabashi, Hirakata (Home), Tambabashi

So, I made it all the way to Osaka… then turned around and went back, past home and finally into the right direction towards Tambabashi.  I jumped off the train at Tambabashi, and switched to the Subway to Kyoto station.  I got here about 9.20am, sooo… 20 minutes late… but all is well, because Frank wasn’t here yet.  I grabbed some croissaints for breakfast, and a coffee and waited.

10 o clock… still no Frank – but it totally wasn’t problem because by this time I had begun exploring Kyoto station.  Kyoto Station is by far the most awesomestest train station i’ve ever been to.  I mean, i’ve been here before, but i was only on the platforms, but the moment i walked around this thing I fell in love with it.  Here’s why:

This really is a TRAIN STATION!

11 o clock, I’m hungry again.  Some Ramen shops on the 1293819283rd floor of the Train station opened up.  So I went and checked one of those out.  YUMM! Then I grabbed a coffee just as I got a message from Frank saying that they had arrived at the station.  YAY!

So I went down to meet them, Frank’s posse including Chris (Aussie buddy of mine from Geelong but more recently Lismore), Don (never met him before) and Travis (Seen him around).  However, we were missing one… Mike.  Apparently no one had heard from him since the night before.  So… what do we do?  Well… for starters we decided to go and look at Pidgeons.

We walked to this nearby courtyardy thing, with some old bloke sellin seeds for 100 yen out the front.  I grabbed a packet and walked through to see the pidgeons.

Yeah, a lot of pidgeons, then I got mauled for my seed

ZOMGWTFUXPIDGEONS!!! I felt violated…

So that was fun… pidgeons…

We headed back to the station and went and checked out an electronic store where I saw a trailer for Final Fantasy XIII – YAY! It looks amazing! Then I went and played some digital piano’s for a while before we met up again ready to head off to Arashiyama. Oh but wait! a text from Mike. It read:

“If you want your friend back, meet me outside the West exit of Kyoto Station.  Bring money”

… Ok it didn’t really, it actually said that he was alright and was on his way to Kyoto Station.  He had stayed with some Korean guy that the posse met the night before.  So Mike arrived, and Travis as our guide, we were Arashiyama bound.

I can’t remember how we got there exactly… but, we headed to Sagano-suji station or something, i might be wrong.  But, before we did I bought this ICOCA card.  And, for those back in Brisbane, it’s exactly like a GO Card.

Basically, you charge your card with money at certain ticket machines, then you dont need to buy a ticket, you just swipe the card at the ticket gates and they let you through! Awesome!  The cool thing is, they also work on buses.  I’ll go into more depth with my info on transport post that I’ll post sometime between now and when I die.

Ok so, arrived at Sagano-suji (or something) and started asking the locals where Arashiyama was.  But we were met only with 分かりません’s (I don’t knows). bleh, we grabbed a map and found our way there.  But on the way we found some shops selling food.

We got these croquet things, which were ace, but then we got something else, that was totally gooey and sickly sweet.  We binned that quick-fast. Then we spotted this area just down the road:

That’s Arashiyama in the background

After we took 12398712938 pictures each, we crossed the bridge, got a few pics from there too:

And walked up to Arashiyama. We began our climb to the monkeys, not before reading the warning signs:

Some pics of the climb:

Ok so on the way up, we spotted 2 monkeys.  Now i’ll be honest, the warning signs I read early did make me a little uncomfortable with the monkeys, because if anyone has seen my pre-hiroshima post you’ll know what monkeys can do to you… I like my shoes… But… these monkeys were pretty friendly… Actually they were VERY friendly:

Anywayz, moving on, we reached the top.  Uhh… the monkeys were waaay cool. Not only that but the view was absolutely breathtaking!  But you guys need video’s and pics for this:

After we finished up on Arashiyama, we headed back across the bridge to the mainland and to a nearby temple.  It was nice there, very templey.  There really isn’t much to say about temples.  I’ve found that a lot of people say that if you’ve been to 1 (or 3) temples in Japan, then you’ve pretty much been to all of them (the same has been said about castles).  I’ve been to a couple now and i’d have to agree.  I plan on doing a specific blog for temples in the future, but for now the pictures will get an accurate point across:

Ok so now… This day really can only be summed up by a video, and so i’ve made this video extra special for this trip to Arashiyama, and this wonderful milestone occasion.  Enjoy.

Ciao for Now!