Bullet Train

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Brett woke this morning feeling very poorly. Some type of alien man-flu, only clearly much worse. However, being the samurai that he now is (given he has a knife) he soldiered on so the holiday could continue as planned.

After a quick breakfast, we caught a taxi to nishiki market. A large under-cover area much like the central market in Adelaide only with octopus ice blocks and some other weird things that I'm not sure what they actually were. We will examine the photos under the microscope when we get home with the aid of a forensic expert to see if we can work out what we were looking at.

As always, despite the weirdness of some things, everything was beautifully presented and looked so good.

We dawdled through the market for a while before coming across the second part of the area which was the clothes and other items. Pamela got her ninja shopping skills in action and visited nearly every one of the 2,724 shops in a little over 45 minutes.

To be honest, we just wandered through a small section of this area and saw a handful of interesting shops. Brett found a massage shop and had a very nice foot massage which eased a few knots caused by all the walking. Pamela found a very nice crystal pendant that she couldn't live without. When she read the description it said that people who were drawn to this crystal were burned out and needed a holiday. Pamela used to collect tea towels when she travelled but has now changed to crystal pendants so you'll always know how much travel we have done by the amount of different necklaces she has!

We returned to the hotel for a quick lunch put on by the conference organisers and then boarded busses for an afternoon tour.

As we were driving to the first temple, Pamela said "no butter" to me. I was confused until she pointed to a sign on a building that read "no buta". I suggested that it might not be a literal translation but, who knows.

We visited two temples and then were dropped backed at Gion for another wander around there. This time it turned into a trip to a coffee shop and a sit down to rest.

We had dinner with the conference and, despite having a valid excuse to leave for an early night due to being unwell, we supported the Australian contingent as we sang Neil diamond's "Sweet Caroline" as part of the karaoke session. With about 20 on stage, the people singing flat balanced out the people singing sharp and it sounded ok. The audience seemed to enjoy it anyway.

We turned in around 10:30 so we could be up early for the train to Hiroshima.

Random thought for today: single-ply toilet paper is not as good as multi-ply!

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