Kyoto R0x0rz!!1!1!!

Dude, Kyoto was freaking awesome. There were places to hang out all night, girls just walking around in yukata (summer kimonos), temples pretty much every other block, a place where you can go read manga for 100 yen per fifteen minutes or something 24 hours a day (hello, hotel alternative for broke students!), hardcore guys who have redefined ricing out a car so that it's actually impressive, pounds of good food, and people everywhere. There were loads of 'em. This picture doesn't even begin to do it justice. I've never been anywhere so packed with people in my life. It was so good to actually be in a crowd...

It was also fantastic to get espresso based coffee again. I dragged Eric to Starbucks three separate times. Just FYI, the drinks are exactly the same (except no ventis) but the pasteries are not. At all. I bought a scone and was very excited at the prospect of having a real bread-type object, but for some reason the bakers had decided that salt was an uncessary ingredient. Very disappointing. On a related note, my new goal is to explain how I want my caramel macchiato to have the caramel sauce on the bottom so that it actually mixes into the drink, instead of on the top like it's usually made, which results in caramelly foam, but not caramelly drink. Don't get the wrong impression - the lattes and macchiatos were a very necessary and appreciated fix for an increasingly desperate addict - just it'd be even better the other way.

Don't think that all I did was get coffee. There's just so much more that I don't really even know where to start. I went to about 5 temples, a fantastic art exhibit, the Gion Matsuri festival on Sunday night (a preparty, if you will), and the actual parade on Monday. There's almost 200 pictures I'm in the middle of wading through and sorting and deleting all the blurry ones and the ones that aren't bright enough and blah blah blah...

Hmm. Tomorrow I'll write about the actual festival and temples, but to satiate your thirst for information, here's a few pictures of the other stuff.

Some Buddha matreshkas...

A rather interesting menu...
read the fine print at the bottom. They're either extremely efficient or extremely cheap...and I want to see a one-bean saw.

Some brilliant advertising...
(I got some funny looks from bystanders for taking this picture)

This fortune telling machine is pretty hardcore -












Check out the little yellow sign on the right of the machine.

And here's a low-quality preview of what the whole festival's about.
I chose this one because it's got the lanterns that were everywhere and the cart and the musicians, which is most of the really cool stuff. This is one of the carts/floats that make up the parade. It's two stories tall and those guys are sitting on the second story playing music. The float itself is somewhere in the streets of Gion, the night before the parade. People can come around and see all the floats before the parade starts as part of the pre-parade-party.

More on the actual trip tomorrow.

PS. Vivek, I found the store just for you.