{"id":32907,"date":"2022-12-11T22:20:38","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T14:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=32907"},"modified":"2026-03-13T20:49:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T12:49:41","slug":"day-01-kyoto-arrival-and-philosophers-walk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2022\/12\/11\/day-01-kyoto-arrival-and-philosophers-walk\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 01 @ Kyoto – Arrival and Philosopher’s Walk"},"content":{"rendered":"

A scan of our Facebook friends’ feeds quickly shows how popular Japan is as a travel destination this time round – no doubt again on account that a lot of Singaporeans really want to have their vacations in Japan before China allows its people to travel. And from the most recent news, that doesn’t look too far off now!<\/p>\n

Our SQ flight to Nagoya’s Chubu Centrair International Airport turned out to be anything but uneventful. Specifically, it was to have departed at 1:20AM and land in Nagoya at 8:30AM. Our plane left the belt and began taxing away as scheduled – but just before we were to take off, the pilot reported that there was some sort of technical malfunction with the plane. Specifically, the brakes (!?!). The plane returned back to the belt where we waited for engineers to take a look and make a determination. Left pretty unsaid was whether what looked like a full flight of passengers would have to deplane! Thankfully, we didn’t. After waiting for over 1.5 hours, the plane was cleared to take off, and at 3:15AM – almost two hours after the originally scheduled time. Our arrival into Nagoya was similarly delayed, with the plane landing at 9:45AM.<\/p>\n

Clearance at immigration was thankfully speedy, especially since we’d submitted all our docs online and obtained the very important QR codes to show that all of us were fully vaccinated, weren’t previously convicted felons in Japan, and weren’t bringing in any sort of contraband into the country. We boarded our airport transfer train from Chubu to Nagoya Station, bought tickets for a Shinkansen ride from Nagoya Station to Kyoto Station, then made our way to our Kyoto hotel – about a 10-minute walk from the station – where we finally linked up with our Ang Mo bud who stood outside the hotel to welcome us haha.<\/p>\n

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Getting the kids to do homework – in the form of daily journal writing. Brought along a mobile printer just for this too so that they can print and paste photos as we go along.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Peter is now at an age where he can – and will – engage with Matt all day long with inane banter. LOL.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our itinerary was a little messed up at this point – with our timing pushed back by an hour, and lunch hour at Kyoto Station at Sunday 1:30PM saw throngs of crowds at cafes and restaurants. We ended up at a small diner at Isetan’s Food Festival basement with just five seats – exactly enough for our party of five – lunched there and witnessed Matt speaking in conversational Japanese (!!!!), then headed to our first sightseeing place: the Philosopher’s Walk<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

We’d actually done a small bit of this stretch in our 2009 trip, but for reasons of time then, didn’t walk for more than 10 minutes. This time round, we started at about the midpoint where we could take a left, or a right. We decided on the former, which also meant we would be moving off in the opposite direction of our second sightseeing place: Eikan-d\u014d Temple. We ended up dropping the latter activity, since we wouldn’t have time for it anyway.<\/p>\n

The Walk was quite scenic and for the most part only saw the very occasional other visitors. We got a bit of late afternoon sunlight that made for some very lovely pictures. This place would be stunning during Sakura blossoms or in autumn, but we made do.<\/p>\n

Dinner was at Katsukura @ The Cube. We absolutely had to visit this popular Tonkatsu restaurant – it’s been a 13-year itch for us since our last visit in 2009. We’ll do a post on our dining experiences later.<\/p>\n

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Lovely autumn colors shown with help from the late afternoon sun.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Matt wondered how the residents who stay in houses along the walk would take to their backyard being a tourist spot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Left or right. We took the left.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Blind spot mirror for drivers making for a selfie shot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Our walk this time round, 2022 edition.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We didn’t get to do most of our initially planned Day 1 itinerary – which included Eikan-d\u014d Temple, Shinkyogoku Shopping Street Union, and Hanamikoji Street. We probably won’t try to do the Temple again in the coming days, but the latter two should be easier to squeeze in – hopefully!<\/p>\n

Continued in the next post on Day 02.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A scan of our Facebook friends’ feeds quickly shows how popular Japan is as a travel destination this time round – no doubt again on account that a lot of Singaporeans really want to have their vacations in Japan before<\/p>\n

Read More Day 01 @ Kyoto – Arrival and Philosopher’s Walk<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[673],"class_list":["post-32907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-traveling","tag-kansai-japan-2022","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/blog-2022-japan-kansai-day-01-20221211_155908-kyoto.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32907"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38398,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32907\/revisions\/38398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}