Published: 27.10.2025
12 1/2 hours of flight and seven hours of time difference are best managed with a neck pillow, horrifically tight support stockings, a happily snagged window seat with a view, and two good movies featuring Paul Mescal, Joaquín Phoenix, and Lady Gaga; a bit of music from Amy Winehouse helps as well.
The route from Helsinki to Osaka was almost comical: first straight down over Warsaw, keeping a safe distance from Lviv, then on to Bucharest, sharp turn over the Black Sea, and then more or less straight ahead. Unfortunately, it was mostly pitch dark, but just before Ulan Bator, the horizon started to brighten and over the Gobi Desert, just before Beijing, the sun shone brightly and the views were breathtaking. The only city we flew directly over was Seoul, which looks extremely ugly from above. And from the plane, it’s very clear how China, Korea, and Japan are polluting the seas with their massive cities: Yellowish-green patches of water stretch for many kilometers along the coasts, and only far out does it gradually turn blue.
However, I was again very impressed by the miracle of flying, that it is possible at all, the distances one can cover in such a short time, and what there is to see and marvel at, even though it is politically completely incorrect. The last time I crossed the border into China by land, I burst into tears of excitement for the same reason….
In between, there were the obligatory Finnish meatballs and a pitiful little bottle of wine, later a soggy omelet with mushy roasted potatoes (things were better back then….😅).
By the way, the whole plane was half-filled with Japanese and the other half with German passengers; the route via Helsinki is probably still affordable.
In Osaka, however, things started with disasters after the eSIM activation had already worked flawlessly during the plane's taxiing: The ATM refused to accept my two different Visa cards, one Finnish and one German, perfectly ordinary cards. I broke out in a hot sweat and then a cold sweat: I had only exchanged 200€ in Helsinki as a precaution, and in Japan, almost everything is still paid in cash, especially my landlady at the guesthouse in Kyoto, who wanted both the rent for 6 weeks and the deposit handed over in cash. Thankfully, I had a third Visa card in my wallet, which I hadn’t expected to work abroad, but with the S-Pankki card, the machine finally spat out my yens.
The next problem followed immediately: I had reserved a ticket back in Finland to travel from Osaka Airport to Kyoto by express train, and that stupid ticket had vanished from my phone just as I was about to board. A very friendly railway officer then helped me, even in English, patiently, until we managed to somehow revive the ticket on the screen just before departure and he even carried my luggage onto the train and hoisted it onto the rack.
After all the excitement and the sleepless night, I treated myself to a taxi to the guesthouse, which is on a slope that can only be accessed by very narrow alleys, and at the end, one has to drag oneself up a ramshackle stone staircase. However, this staircase is one of the places I missed the most in the last five years; strange! The taxi driver, of course, didn’t know the address and didn’t speak a word of foreign language, but he was very willing to follow my hand-drawn sketch and a faded printout from Google Maps, and he dropped me off right at the bottom of the steps.
Reuniting with Kim, my landlady, and the lovely old guesthouse was warm and emotional, especially since it is supposed to be sold and closed by the end of February at the latest because apparently, maintenance has simply become too expensive post-Corona, and not enough long-term guests are coming.
I took the corner room on the first floor, where Johnny had stayed in 2018/19. This room has the best view of the beautiful green mountains surrounding Kyoto, is 6 tatamis large, has sliding windows that do not close, and has no further furnishings besides a flat table, the futon, an electric heating mat underneath, and a wardrobe. Everything else in the house is unchanged, which delights me greatly.
I spent the rest of the brief day (it gets dark around five) walking around the neighborhood to see which restaurants and shops are still there. I will visit our little sento (hot baths) around the corner tomorrow; unfortunately, the convenience store around the corner is closed, and I have yet to find the restaurant where they used to serve delicious deep-fried dough balls with octopus and where the owner had octopuses in every shape and size made of all sorts of materials standing and hanging around, but my “Jazz and Whiskey” with an endless supply of vinyl records still exists, and in one of our regular places, the Caravan, where mainly students and lonely old men sit around eating grilled and fried food, and where the same old host is still behind the counter smiling and serving with his daughter, I enjoyed a delicious Japanese dinner of omelet, gyoza, miso soup, rice, and grilled mackerel for a total of 4.50€! I was totally happy that this place still looks just like it did years ago, and the atmosphere hasn’t changed either, and I’m now really glad that I dared to travel to Japan alone.
