Erica & Todd go to Japan! Day 8: Kyoto / Hakone

The alarm didn't get set, so we slept in a bit, which worked out nicely. Had another buffet breakfast and walked around the hotel's gardens a bit, which were lovely. There are some photos posted.

Took the shuttle bus to the train station, shopped for shoes for Erica (no results though), got some snacks and got on the shinkansen. Was in Odawara in about 2 hours. From Odawara, hopped a bus to Miyanoshita, where the ryoken (traditional Japanese inn) was. Took the cable car down. It's located at the bottom of a valley along a river. It's all pretty Japanese olde-skool and stuff. Staff was great; enthusiastic, with just enough English for us to mostly get by. Erica continues to whup ass w/ her linguistic skills, which is great.

Took a public (segregated) bath before dinner. Was familar w/ Japanese bathing protocols due to stays at the Miyako Hotel in SF, which has traditional Japanese baths (w/ instructions!).

There are lots of different types of footwear and a lot of rules surrounding when each can be worn. It's quite amusing.

Each room is assigned a maid for the duration of your stay. More like a butler kind of thing than the "clean up all your stuff" type of thing. She kept laughing, not sure if it was at us or what. She also seemed to think that Erica was cute. Had an awesome (seemingly never-ending) trad Japanese dinner. There were some suspicious pickles that Erica had to spit, but other than that, it was great. Also, we chose the "fresh" sake over the hot sake. It was tasty and I was a bit toasty. Dinner took an hour and a half, with many introductions of new dishes. For each dish, the maid would place my portion in front of me and tell me what it was, then place Erica's in front of her and tell her what it was, even though it was the same thing.

Reserved a co-ed private "family time" outdoors bath. We were led out of the building across the river to a private bathing pavilion w/ 2 pools. One "very" hot up high and the other just "hot" lower by the river. It was awesome.

Here's the link to our photos of Hakone.

Erica & Todd go to Japan! Day 9: Hakone / Tokyo

Slept like crap due to futon mattresses on the floor. But, had a pretty good Japanese breakfast at the ryoken. Took much less time than dinner. Had an outdoors bath (segregated) prior to checkout. The awesome guy at the top of the cable car gave us a ride to the train station, which was super nice. Overall extremely happy w/ the ryoken. Although, it turns out that Erica found the service too intrusive.

Visited the Hakone Open Air Sculpture Museum. There were some pretty interesting sculptures there. Worth the visit, but expensive.

Decided to go to Gora and catch the cable car up the mountain. Lots of standing and waiting. Transportation is not as well organized, especially for non-Japanese speakers as even Kyoto is. I guess that's due to the much smaller non-speaking population that visits than the other places. Saw Mt Fuji from the cable car, which was great. Also the great stinking sulfur pits or somesuch. Looked like Mordor! We decided not to make the whole trip around the lake and so headed back down the rope way and cable car. It was tougher to get back to Tokyo due to discrepancies between the tourist map and reality. Buses were supposed to go places they didn't as were trains. So, it took a bit longer than we would have liked, but make it we did. Checked back into the Intercontinental for our last two nights