It was a long travel day to get all the way to Kyoto but we made it in good spirits and a little tired and delirious. Our 3 hour layover in Seattle was spent at the Centurion lounge eating a delicious breakfast. Blessings. Our 10 hour flight was spent watching movies and taking short naps. It was so strange to not have to keep a little one entertained. We landed in Kansai International Airport which is actually on an island...how crazy is that. Made it through customs without any problems. The guy at the customs desk asked me for my military ID and orders. I think he got confused with all the re-entry stamps from when we lived there before. Too funny because they were all dated 2013 or earlier. We made our way over to the ticket office and bought our Shinkansen tickets to Kyoto. Only able to read half of what the ticket said we were able to find the correct platform and waited for our train. 80 min later we arrived in Kyoto station which is huge and somewhat confusing. It was a team effort to navigate that station to exit on the correct side. Luckily we popped out exactly where we wanted to be and only had a quick 2 block walk to our hotel. Yay...we made it. We got cleaned up and headed out to eat dinner. In the amazing itinerary book Mike made us he suggested to eat at Katsukura for some tasty Ton Katsu. It took some time to figure out how to get over to that side of the station and up into the restaurant area on the 11th floor of the Isetan building. We managed to get there before the crowds and sat right down to order. The Ton Katsu (breaded pork) was ordered by size in grams. That was strange to me. Andrew said I hope you remember your Japanese because you have to order for us. The nice thing is most people in populous areas speak a little English but I ordered in Japanese anyways. A little rusty but I did it. Our meal was outstanding and as I was eating I felt like I was floating outside my body...clearly sleep depravation was kicking in. We finished eating and headed to the bread store for Andrew but most of the bread was picked over. Maybe tomorrow. Instead we stopped at a convenient store to grab treats and paid with my Suica with the tap of my phone (Japan’s version of Apple Pay). Sweet...it worked. Thanks Mike for setting that up for me. Then it was back to the hotel and into bed. What a great first day!
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