Day 5: Kyoto Seika

Disclaimer: as you will soon read in this post, I was staying at a "hotel" with barely any electricity and no wifi for the past 4 nights, so blogs are being posted all at once now that I am in Tokyo. But anyways, here is what happened for the past four nights without internet.

On day five we said goodbye to Osaka and headed to Kyoto! The bus, train combo took up most of the morning and I was already liking Kyoto better than Osaka just even from the differences in the people. The Osaka train stations we observed during rush hour were just flooded with people going to work in a sea of black and most people just looked really unhappy. Now in Kyoto train stations are even less crowded and people wear color and they just generally look happier. Plus there are a lot of students and I think a lot more variation in the people and the number of tourists around. After a quick lunch at the train station in Kyoto we headed to Kyoto Seika University to meet our new Japanese friends. We collaborated on a project with 12 architecture students from the university all weekend and got to work in their studios with them. It was such a good time and they were so adorable, but more on that later.

We stayed at the university until late and then headed to our hotel in Kyoto to check in. Our "hotel" had a 10pm curfew, a 5pm-9pm shower curfew, no working electricity outlets, no internet, and our AC was broken when we got in so we opened the window so there were bugs everywhere and construction literally directly outside the window on the street right below, and to top it off we slept on tatami mats with pillows that were hard as rocks, literally. So after checking in we decided there was nothing better to do than drink so we could fall asleep, and that's what we did.