Sunday 22/10
We try to wake up at 8am but we stay in bed another 30’.
The weather is still bad: it hasn’t stopped raining since yesterday evening. Moreover, the main activity of the day no longer exists: while preparing our visits of Sunday (there are 2 important festivals on 22 October), I indeed read on a website that the Jidai Matsuri festival has been cancelled (the last time it happened was 20 years ago…). Bad luck; it is a great festival. It is primarily composed of a 2-kilometer, 5-hour long procession of 2,000 volunteers dressed in historical costume representing Japanese cultural history.
We don’t wake up the children. They sleep quite late (10am).
I go and buy some bread, croissants and chocolate breads at Paul, not too far from the apartment. Isabelle prepares eggs. Nice brunch. We finish around noon.
We do some homeschooling. I try to sort out my pictures. I have more than 10 days of delay in the posts and I don’t like it (it’s more fun to do the posts the same day or with 2-3 days delay).
Around 3pm, we go to our appointment with Tomoko, the (female) guide that I found on internet a few months ago (in June) to accompany us to Kurama (15 km from Kyoto) to attend the Festival of Fire (which starts at 6pm). We meet her in a metro station. After discussing with her, we take the (difficult) decision to cancel our trip over there. It’s raining too much and the forecast doesn’t show any improvement… A Fire Festival under the rain won’t be very fun. It’s such a pity! We were on the right day at the right place to attend these festivals (which doesn’t happen very often during our world trip).
We go to Nishiki market to eat sushi at the Iyomata restaurant. Second try, second disappointment: it’s closed again (too late for lunch).
We thus walk to the conveyor-belt sushi place where we went 2 days ago. Kids like it very much. It’s very nice formula (you choose or your order and it’s ready in less than 1’, prepared in front of you). We then walk back to the apartment.
Jules wants to play board games. We do it while Isabelle checked how to go to Osaka, where we go tomorrow. We won’t take the Shinkansen (more expensive and not arriving at station near our hotel). Even if this bullet train goes twice as fast, the gain of time is not significant enough (20’). But I would have liked to take the bullet train at least once (it’s one of the main representative “images” of a trip in Japan, isn’t it?).
We eat the picnic I had prepared for the Fire Festival (nice olive bread from Paul with charcuterie).
What was supposed to be one of the greatest day of our Japan trip ended up being a very quiet day…
I work a bit on my pictures (backups), until 1:30am. It’s raining heavily. We even receive, twice, alerts on Florence’s iPhone (despite the fact that it was on airplane mode) – see picture. The authorities are proceeding with evacuations in some districts of Kyoto!
