track our trek

we left tokyo thursday afternoon bound for kyoto after an action packed last day…up early in the morning, we headed out to see some professional sumo wrestling…lucky timing for us - there was a tournament going on in tokyo for the last week. we had tickets in hand after going to the family mart the night before with a hand-written note in japanese from the receptionist at our hostel! we got to the arena early and watched a few rounds of the trainees & realized bouts between the big name wrestlers started in the afternoon, so we decided to go check out a couple more spots in tokyo and come back. first we stopped in roppongi hills, an enormous new residential/shopping/entertainment development that was recently completed after some 15 years of construction. daryll indulged the architecture geek in me & we got to see a really cool vintage bmw exhibit in one of the galleries for free! unfortunately, there were about 50 attendants and no photography allowed. :O( from roppongi hills, we jumped on the train to check out electric town, an area of tokyo where reputedly every kind of electronic gizmo and gadget can be found for pretty good prices….here, i indulged the gadget geek in daryll!...then back to the sumo arena for an hour of bouts between the heavyweights…then a mad dash to the hostel to pick up our packs and run for the tokyo station to catch our train.

we slept hard on the train and arrived in kyoto pretty wiped out…we checked into our hostel…j hoppers backpackers hostel…which got the highest ratings on hostelworld.com. the only beds they had available were in an 8-bed mixed dorm room, so we snagged 2 top bunks together and fashioned a tent out of the privacy curtains…a little like camp! the place was not as bright and clean as k’s house in tokyo, but it had a lot of character….tons of information about day trips and walking tours around the city, and lots of photos of travelers who had passed through before…it didn’t even take long to get used to the air conditioner belching over our heads every 40 minutes! everything was going swimmingly until around 2:30 am when i woke to a most noxious smell! i spent a few minutes in search of the source…could it be my underarms?...could it be the bean bag pillow i’d pushed aside?...or maybe the slightly sketchy blanket i’d pulled over me at some point in the night? eventually sleep came again & in the morning, we traded jokes about what the smell could have been. dp combed his memory banks and decided it was the guy in the bunk under him, reminiscent of his freshman year roommate…FUNK loud enough to wake us both up in the middle of the night! between our malodorous bunkmate, smokers in the lobby and cooking smells from the third floor kitchen, we were more than ready to move on to our next destination….k’s house kyoto.