Woke up. Tired. This is a reoccuring theme at this point. I think what I’ll regret the most about this trip is the fact that we didn’t properly plan out the rest days.
We had our breakfast at 7:30, as usual. I think what’s nice about this ryokan is that it’s forcing us to wake up early. We’ll really need to switch to early rising instead of what we’ve been doing so far, because a lot of places in Kyoto will be extremely touristy.
After breakfast, we just rested, packed, whatever. We got out pretty much at 10:00. Our shinkansen tickets were booked for 15:30, so we had a lot of time to kill.
Since our ryokan was pretty close to Susuki Grass fields, we’ve decided to walk there. Since we’ve failed to send our luggage, we had to carry it around… it’s pain…
It’s definitely the wrong time of the year to visit this place, but it was still pretty. If you look at it on Google maps, it’ll be filled with people during autumn. I think I’m fine with seeing it as it is today, though. They will never compare to ukrainian fields!
The clouds were really low in the sky, making it seem like they move super fast. This is what I’ve noticed earlier while in ryokan, but in this place it’s especially apparent.
Thankfully, right at the fields entrance, there was a bus stop… I was so happy I won’t have to carry my luggage all the way back. The bus was almost empty when we got on, but it got extremely packed as we got closer to Odawara. It was hard to breathe and it made me nauseous. Ah, the days of ukrainian marshrutkas…
When we got to Odawara, we still had like 3-4 hours before our train. We were super tired. We’ve decided to drop off our luggage at a locker (thank god for these…) and go to… McDonald’s. I mean, I think Japanese McDonald’s is pretty much the most legendary one, so we’ve wanted to try it out. And we were in a bit of a transitional moment without anything else to do, so it was a perfect time to do it.
It was okay, I guess. Surprisingly, they didn’t have electronic kiosk things so we had to order in-person, which was uncomfortable. You’d think that in Japan they’d have these already, given that other restaurants do. The sauce selection is much worse than in other countries. The burger was very tasty tho, but I can say that about other places too tbh.
There was a camera miniature gacha (I was disappointed to find out it’s not a working camera, but what did I expect for 500 yen) right next to our seats, so I’ve decided to gamble and ended up getting the biggest one. It was cute to see it in comparison to my camera.
We went to the Odawara castle and chilled there for the rest of the time. On the way there, we bought ice cream, and there’s no fucking trash bins anywhere. Pretty much the worst thing about Japan, honestly. Thankfully the park around castle had a bin, parks usually do.
Shinkansen are actually insane. I tried taking a video of one passing, but every time one passed through, by the time I’d turn on the video it’d be gone already. Literally like 2 seconds to pass entire station.
Shinkansen ride was incredibly cool. I used my earphones and listened to the music for the first time since leaving Czechia. I think I should do that more often, it’s very satisfying.
While going to our hotel, ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████
I ate Japanese curry for the first time in Cocoichibanya. So, so good. I could eat it literally every single day.
We rested…
