................Taking Flight...............: Day 3: Nijo-jo Castle, Market area and Kyoto Tower

Our last full day in Kyoto already! We didn't leave quite as early today. We were going to try and get a reservation for the Imperial Park, but they were all full as it was a Saturday and the tour books up quickly.

Instead, we went to Nijo-jo castle. It was a good choice. It was where the shogun lived during the time while there was also an emperor. The building has squeaky wood floors so if someone tried to sneak in, the floors would give them away. It was pretty cool, but if I lived there, listening to those squeaky floors all day would drive me nuts. No pictures were allowed inside the castle and no drawing/sketching was permitted either which I thought was kind of interesting. After walking around inside the castle part, we could walk on the grounds. It was really beautiful there. We even saw a Japanese wedding on the grounds!

After the castle, we decided to head to the downtown area to find lunch, picking a choice from our guidebook. We found a ramen restaurant and funny enough, we had passed it on our first day! There was a short wait before we were seated in the restaurant. We ordered two different kinds of ramen, dumplings and a side dish of mixed vegetables. Everything was quite delicious. We were enjoying everything immensely...until I kept working through my bowl and went for that one last bite...and scooped out a piece of hair! We called over a waitress and she apologized and offered to bring a new one. As I had already eaten almost all of it, we said no, I didn't want a new one so instead she took my ramen off the bill, which was nice and I wasn't expecting. I did feel bad because it was at the end of the meal and I didn't want it to seem like I had placed the hair to get a free meal or anything.

We walked through the market again and I found some magnets that I was looking for. We also did a little bit of gift shopping and snack buying. Evening was approaching, but we stopped back at our guesthouse to drop stuff off. Then we went to Kyoto Tower. We planned it so that we could be up in the tower around the time the sun set. It was a pretty nice view and it was cool to see the city spread beneath us and look for the places that we had been to on our trip.

Our mission for dinner was donkasu, fried pork cutlet. We went to the station to look for a restaurant. There was only one place that had donkasu; there was already a bit of a line, but we decided to stay and wait. All of a sudden there was a long line behind us. I wasn't sure if it was because the restaurant was famous/good, people saw the line and figured it was good/famous or because it was the only donkasu restaurant in the station! After waiting about 20 minutes we were seated and made our order. Unfortunately, the donkasu I wanted (stuffed with vegetables too) wasn't available anymore. When our food came out we enjoyed, but it wasn't as great as we were expecting. After dinner, we walked around the station because it was so big and had many shops. We exited and looked at another shopping mall place closer to the guesthouse (though the guesthouse is only about a 5 minute walk from the station). There, I found a nice blouse and a purse! After shopping, we realized we had a lot of change leftover and were still a little hungry. We went to MCD and I got a seasonal Halloween McFlurry-it was so good!

When we returned to the guesthouse, we just packed everything because we have to leave quite early in the morning for our 9:15AM flight.