Stoat - Where?

Kyoto is home to no less than 17 World Heritage sites, so it’s pretty ridiculous that I hadn’t managed to visit it in the 7 months I’ve been here. That changed yesterday when I went on a day trip with some other teachers. We arrived into Kyoto at 8:55am so that we had as much time as possible to spend there. The first thing that was striking was the railway station, which is huge and has 16 floors. Most of this is hotel, but the main plaza was cavernous, with thousands of people milling around. This time of year is one of the most popular to visit Kyoto as all the leaves begin to change colours. We bought an all day bus pass for only ¥500 and I’d highly recommend that to anyone visiting.
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Christmas decorations have started going up here, so the place is beginning to look quite festive. It’s nice that they waited till November, as Manchester seems to put them up earlier and earlier each year. The usual background music in every store has changed to Come All Ye Faithful and Jingle Bells, and combined with the recent temperature drop, it’s starting to feel a bit like home. The difference is that here will almost certainly be a white Christmas; in a few weeks we are due to start the snow season and as everything works like clockwork here, there’s no reason to suppose the weather doesn’t too.

I’ll be working on Christmas day and it’s going to be strange being away from home and family, but I’m still looking forward to it. There’s still the possibility of leaving the country for a few days over New Year as well, and if that fails it’ll probably be skiing with all the injuries that entails… By the way, if you were thinking of sending presents, you should probably think about posting them now-ish… (^_^)

I’m off to Kyoto tomorrow (finally). Hopefully the wind and rain will hold off long enough to see most of the temples and shrines.