My Craziest Weekend So Far

I was not expecting to have such a wild post for my second web blog, but here we are! All I've done today is work on this webpage, but I finally got everything posted and caught up so that's okay with me. Let's roll back Friday morning.

I woke up a little tired from my date the previous night. I knew my friends had made rough plans to go to Osaka, the port city next to Kyoto where all the crazy buildings, shopping, and nightlife goes on. Osaka is the next best thing to Tokyo in terms of the envisioned "modern" Japan. However, none of my friends had sent any messages and it was 9:00, so I decided to make some friend rice for breakfast and take things slow until they came around. Around noon my buddy Yan updated me on LINE that we were going to head out around 14:30, so I put on my outfit and went down to meet the gang. We stopped at a 7-11 before hopping on the Keihan line, only a 15 minute walk from our dorm, which would take us all the way from Kyoto to Osaka for only 600 Yen, with a duration of 1:40.

We arrived to Shijo, and walked around with the crowds, admiring the towering buildings and busy cityscape. After a while, we grabbed some drinks from a conbini, and sat people watching for quite some time. Next we headed over to a bridge where we watched the sunset. Yan was starving by this point, so we browsed Google Maps in order to find a location for dinner. We eventually decided on a Kushikage (fried food restaurant) which thankfully was close by. The food was good, but not worth the portion sizes for the amount of money we paid.(

As darkness fell, we continued to explore the city while we waited for the club we had been recommended to open. After finding the location, we were surprised by a 50+ person long line. We waited for at least half an hour to get in, and it was absolutely packed. I had fun dancing by myself and also with other random people, and we stayed there all the way until 4:00 AM. After around midnight, the trains stop running, so instead of paying an absurd amount of money for a hotel, our game plan had been to stay up all night and catch the last train home at 5:30 AM.

I barely managed to stay awake on the train home, but I was a little too hungover at that point to comfortably fall asleep sitting upright. We arrived to our station in Kyoto at about 7:00, and on during our walk back to the dorm, Anthony had the brilliant idea to take a morning swim in Kamogawa. We did so, which was quite refreshing, and the morning sun kept me warm as we finished the final five minutes of walking back.

Now, any reasonable person would assume that after drinking and staying up for the entire night, we would have gone promptly to bed. However, as we were walking into the dorm, Ethan said "man, the weather is so nice today, it would be a perfect day for a hike..." FULL PAUSE. The boys all looked at each other. And then made perhaps a very terrible decision to go on a full day hike. We spent about 15 minutes convincing Alex to join us, but Anthony was eventually able to sweet talk him into doing it. We all agreed that this "dad lore" would perhaps be one of the best stories to tell. After all, how many people have gone on a brutally long hike after spending the whole night out?

We biked for about 15 minutes from our dorm to the base of the hiking trail, where luckily there was a free parking lot. Before we got there however, we had stopped at a 7-11 to stock up on food, snacks, and lots of water, as the day would be hot and the hiking vigorous. Ethan told us that the hike was about 16 miles long (out and back) and took him 12 hours to complete the last time. We were in for it. The beginning of the hike passed us through a small shrine, and up a decently steep slope through a deciduous forest. Occasionally the trees would clear, giving us some great views of Kyoto. I had brought my bluetooth speaker, and because there were bear warnings for the area, we blasted the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack during the first portion of the hike, which filled our hearts with fire and made the hiking feel epic.

We found a nice river area and took a short snack break, and then trekked on for another hour or so. We had been hiking for about three at this point when we found a decently large temple complex, overlooking not Kyoto, but Otsu. We hiked just a bit further to a bigger temple where there were a lot of tourists, as at this location there was a road leading to a parking lot for easy access. We took a long lunch break here, and I made every one a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before we pressed onwards. We had to follow the road for a ways before it went back to an extremely steep and trecherous section of trail, but after another half hour of hiking we made it to the very top! The peak of Hieizan is one of the tallest points in the Kansai area, at 848 meters, or 2782 feet for all of you stuck in America.

At this point, we were exhausted. We took a short break at the very top, but realized that if we stayed still for too long, we would all fall asleep. We trekked over to a parking lot and discovered the fastest way to get back to our bikes would be to take two cable cars, and then the Eizan mountain train, followed by a bus to the hospital we parked our bikes at. Everything went as planned, but we missed our bus and ended up walking a whole extra 30 minutes to our bikes in a state of delusion. Thankfully, the way back to our dorm was all the way down hill, so we had a lovely little cruise during golden hour to finish our our crazy day(s). I made it home, took a shower, and pretty much lost conciousness as soon as my head hit my pillow. I fell asleep at 6:00 PM and woke up today, Sunday, at 7:00 AM. All I've done today was make meals, go shopping for food, and worked on this webpage. Finally, it is finished! I'm excited to make more posts, and don't forget to go to the sign up for email updates! Thanks for reading. ほんとにありがとうございます。