Day 7 (Kyoto-Takayama)

On the last day in Kyoto, we started right after breakfast. Packed our things, checked out, and off to the train station. It took us to the station, where we rode a Shinkansen for the first time ever. You always hear how fast they are, but when we actually rode it, we truly felt it. It was so fast that I (who gets motion sickness) started feeling sick when I looked down during turns, like when driving a car.

The Shinkansen took us all the way to Nagoya. While we were waiting for our next train there, we had lunch. I got a bought bento and Nico had sandwiches. The bento had many different things, most of which I didn't know what they were. Overall, it tasted good, but it wasn't really my thing. And to finish it off, we had our first ice cream of the day.

In the train to Takayama, I took a little nap before we finally arrived. Fortunately, the hotel was right next to the station. After we stored our things in the room, our little tour began.

Since we only had one night in Takayama, we couldn't do much, so our plan was to simply walk around the town and see what it had to offer.

We started at the Hida Kokubunji Temple. It was small but high.

While traversing through the town, we passed several promising restaurants, and we later had dinner at one of them. In between, we had something for our stomachs again. Tasty meat skewers and an ice drink from a chocolate shop. They had really good chocolate, so I got some more later on.

After a short while, we reached the old town, which included many buildings in the old Japanese style. Behind it, there was a path that went up the mountain (many cities in Japan were built in small valleys, so they are surrounded by smaller mountains), and I followed it all the way to the top. The path was rocky, full of roots, and not exactly flat, but something in me wanted to run up the mountain. Not just walk, but jog. Just like that. Maybe it was because I hadn't been doing much exercise in the last week and I needed to burn off some energy. Give it all, exhaust myself completely, and just go up. When I reached the top, my heart was pounding so loud that I could barely hear anything else. But exactly that, that exact effort, was something I had somehow missed.

On the way down, I was exhausted but extremely happy. I had missed this kind of exertion and it was exactly what I needed again. Nico, who had been waiting further down, looked at me strangely and probably wondered why I had covered the whole distance at such a speed, as he himself found it quite strenuous to go up just the first part.

Back in the town again, we went to one of the many restaurants that specialize in meat. We ordered: Sushi, but with meat; a kind of rice dish with egg and meat on top; and several pieces of meat that we could grill on a table grill. Everything, and I mean everything, was delicious! I won't go into much detail, but there's one thing I want to mention. The meat we had was of really good quality. Not as good as the skewers the day before, but better than most of the meat we had had before.

When we finished, it was only shortly after 6 o'clock, but the sun was already setting and most of the stores were already closed. This is normal in Japan, though. Even souvenir shops and other tourist attractions, to our disappointment, usually only open until 5 p.m. The stores also usually close early, and combining this with our prior knowledge, we concluded that the Japanese apparently wake up very early to work, but also finish early and go to bed early.

Back at the hotel, we had decided to try out the onsen (Japanese bath) that was part of the hotel. These are a big part of Japanese life. Both in the past and today, bathing is part of Japanese culture. Whether at home or in a public bath, it is indispensable in Japan. Of course, it's a bit unusual at first to bathe in a public bath without any clothes, but that feeling quickly goes away, and after spending a short time in the water, we understood why the Japanese love their onsens. However, there's one thing you need to be careful about: The water has a high temperature of 40-44 degrees Celsius, so you shouldn't stay in too long, otherwise you'll start feeling dizzy. Nevertheless, it was an incredibly relaxing and cleansing experience that we definitely want to repeat someday.

Freshly bathed and still full from dinner, I went to bed, while Nico stayed up to watch Formula 1 during the night and didn't get much sleep.