Day 8 - Kyoto - Nara - Osaka

We were breakfasted, dressed, and checked out of the hotel by 8 am. Then we waited a few minutes for the bus and rode that to Kyoto station. Here, we headed for the Kintetsu lone and rode the limited express to Nara. It was fully reserved seating, so we had to pay an extra 540 yen each. Within 45 minutes, we were in Nara.

Once at Nara, we discovered that the Nara marathon was on today, the streets were lined with people cheering, and there were thousands of runners. We made our way through Nara Park, photographing deer and beautiful red leaves on trees.

Then we made our way to Todaiji Temple, the largest wooden building I Japan that houses a Budda over 30m tall and weighing 250 tonnes. The building was massive.

After seeing the temple, we stopped for an ice cream. Then we made our way back towards the station. We stopped at 7-11 for a light lunch. Then we walked up and down a few shopping streets before catching the 1:06pm train to Osaka.

Once we arrived at Nipponbashi station, we only had a 160m walk to our hotel,where we got to check in early at 2pm. After a rest, we set off again at 3pm. Our mission was to see if we wanted to buy another suitcase and purchase extra baggage. After much deliberation, we decided not to and left the final luggage store at 5 pm. (Note to Feb trip us - Donki at Dotonbori had the legend walker for 11900yen).

We then decided to have tonkatsu for our meal and headed off towards a nearby tonkatsu matsunoya. We got there right before a big rush and had a lovely dinner. Next on the agenda was to look at some stores I wanted to, so we hit up some suruguya and lashingbang stores. (Note to Feb self - the animate/lashingbang store south of Namba had some good stuff).

It was now 8 pm, and some stores were closing, and we were beat. So we headed for the hotel for our last night in Japan.Read more