Rainy Day in Kyoto

As I mentioned in the last post today was going to be a rainy day since we had swapped out our plans to just do some quieter activities today that we’re mostly inside our original plan was to hike which just really wasn’t meant to work we really enjoyed the teamlabPlanets that we did in And a new teamLab opened up in Kyoto a few months ago so I got tickets online for 10:30 AM.  that meant everyone got to sleep until about nine. I was up at 6 AM, of course re-jigging the itinerary for the day. Since we had some extra time, Trevor and I decided to walk over to 711 in the morning so that we could get our 7-Eleven smoothies which was on our food scavenger hunt. There are two different kinds of smoothies they have at 7-Eleven some of them are frozen and you blend them and then some of them are more like frappe’s. The one near our place only had the frappe version

We buy pastries at 7-Eleven every day for breakfast and it never ceases to amaze us. The ones we see this is literally just a hotdog bun filled with whipped cream so many sandwiches and buns in Japan are just filled with whipped cream.

So the way these frappe‘s work is there in the freezer section and they have like ice cream and berries in them and then you bring them over to this machine after you paid for themand you click the frappe button and it adds milk into them. I’m not sure if the milk was warm or cold to be honest. after that, you sort of squished the plastic cup, and mix it all together and then you use the straw to kind of blend it into a frappe

This was before we really blended them very well and we were just walking back to the Airbnb

This is the assortment of Japanese pastries that will last us a couple of days for breakfasts. I think we are close to trying almost every single thing they sell in the 7-Eleven pastry aisle

Here’s our frappe fully mixed. It was delicious. Basically it was just a milkshake for breakfast so how can you go wrong?

Trevor got this Feng that said peanuts on it and he assumed that it was peanut butter but it turns out it was like a peanut whipped cream inside or a peanut butter icing very sweet

Joel trying out the green tea

This was on our way to team labs some of the words that you need to remember for street names or station names are so complicated

Overall, I think teamlabPlanets was a bit more fun. I’m not sure if it was because we had already done a teamLab so we had kind of seen a lot of of the ideas before or if it just didn’t have exhibits that were quite as cool. But the highlight was definitely the bubble room you suited up in these raincoats and shoe covers and you had to wear a mask to go in as well I guess in case you inhaled some bubbles. Funniest family selfie ever

Once you got in the room, there was literally just huge bubble blobs floating around in the air that you could push them and cut them and move them and hold them. It was really really fun. We ended up spending probably about a half an hour and they’re just playing with the bubbles. definitely hard to capture in the pictures the videos capture it much better

 

Once we were done, you go into the secondary room right outside the bubble room, and you realize that we were all covered in bubble

So there’s this guy with a leaf blower type thing that was there to just blow the bubbles off you before you left the room it was pretty funny

This was probably the second coolest room that they had there, which was these crazy beans with different light patterns that would change every few seconds

Some pictures of some of the other rooms

At the end, they had a room very similar to the room. We already did at team labs where you could draw a picture and they would put it on the floor so Anna Trevor and I did our 62nd versions since we were getting pretty hungry for lunch.

I made a Canadian salamander

For lunch, there’s a Ramen hall food court at Kyoto station so we went there Kyoto station is seriously like an entire city. It takes probably 30 minutes to walk from one end to the other and it has like 11 floors and so while it seems like it would be easy to find something that is in the train station. This took us probably 20 minutes to actually find. It is just so crazy how big the station is and how much is in there?

They’re about 10 different Ramen shops in there altogether and it was kind of intimidating to pick which one but we saw one with a big empty table and a friendly person out there that spoke English that guided us to how to use the machine so we decided on that, and it turns out the Ramen was quite delicious. We all got the spicy broth. It had bamboo shoots and it also had this very thin tofu skin that was almost like a super super thin lasagna noodle. I don’t know how to describe it, but we all liked it except for Owen who really didn’t like that part and tried to eat the noodles around that.

From therewe decide to do some shopping Owen and Trev were going do some climbing at a climbing gym but Owen decided he really wasn’t into climbing today and just wanted to shop so Trev and Owen decided to just stick with us. We checked the metro to the Pokémon center, which is really just a store filled with Pokémon stuff

I have a few cute Pokémon statues in the store

We didn’t find anything to buy, but it was fun to wander around

From there, we took the metro to the Nintendo store. I thought this was actually cooler than the Pokémon centre

Trevor bought this shirt

After that, we spent a little bit more time at the mall I tried on some Onitsuka Tiger shoes (a very popular Japanese running shoe brand). The store was a mad house and I waited forever tried in a pair and they were too big and they didn’t have the size down so left empty handed :(. By this time, the boys who absolutely hate shopping but said they wanted to shop today were losing patients quickly. Owen has been a pain in the butt on this trip when he is not having whatever we are doing and just starts bugging everybody and at this point they were done and we realized shopping wasn’t going to entertain them for the afternoon I had asked ChatGPT for some rainy day ideas the night before and it had mentioned this round one arcade place I wasn’t sure if we were anywhere near it, but I checked and it turned out. We were a five minute walk away. Everyone agreed that they’d rather do that and we headed in that direction

Turns out this is just what the doctor ordered. We had a blast year. This place has five or six floors with bedding, machines, arcade, machine, machines, claw machine, machines darts, billiards bowling you name it if it’s a game they had it

Inside was the atmosphere of a casino just noises everywhere and absolute madness

These guys were playing this crazy game that was like guitar hero, and I have never seen anything like it. Their fingers were moving faster than my brain could possibly process. These three guys were all playing the same game at the same time and they were completely *NSYNC hitting every single exact movement right they had special gloves on like these guys must’ve practised for hundreds and hundreds of hours to get this good

We played some arcade games. It was kind of hard because all of the instructions were in Japanese so you didn’t really know what you were doing.

But then we went to the claw machine floor, and this is where we really had a blast You can really see how they get you with these claw machines because you go to pick something up and you have it and you pick it all the way up to the top and then suddenly it just falls out and a lot of times it falls into a position where you think oh my gosh now that it’s in that position, I can definitely get it And soon enough, you’ve tried five times and paid five dollars for trying to win a three dollar stuffy But I have to say the fun that you have while doing it makes it worth the five dollars we had a blast We all watched while everyone tried and tried to strategize the best way to get the things and it was so disappointing every time something would fall

Kayla: look what I won for you!! This was literally the first ¥100 coin that I put in one of these machines and I just picked up this bear and got it first try It gave us a lot of false hope as to how easy these claw machines were because after that we lost so many times I think I put another five ¥100 coins into this machine trying to get another one, but no luck

It was even fun just wandering around the huge store looking at the hundreds and hundreds of different claw machines some had snacks some had toys some had Pokémon some had plushy’s some had makeup some had changed purses some had face cloths just anything you could imagine

The boys had great luck at the pocky machine and decided it was the easiest machine to win, but then Anna tried and she had several coins and couldn’t get anything

Trump had zero luck and didn’t win anything the whole time

This is what would happen you get a great grip on Snorlax

You’d watch him rise way into the air

And then suddenly he’d fall

But somehow I looked away, and Joel came out with this huge win He was so proud. We have five carry-on bags and we had no idea how we would get this guy home, but Joel is bound and determined to take his prize home and spent the rest of the day strategizing how we could get this guy home so we didn’t have to leave them here and no, I am not paying $75 to check a bag so that this guy can come home in check luggage

And with Anna‘s last one dollar coin, she won this Pokémon change purse. I think we spent $63 total and we all had a blast. Well worth the money on a rainy day.

By this point everyone was in better moods and re-energized and we wandered along this indoor shopping area with lots of cool stores, gift stores, vintage clothing stores

We did that for a bit until we got hungry for supper. We decided to check out a conveyor sushi restaurant again this time it was a different chain.  This is common in Japan, where you have a curtain across your table for privacy. Interestingly, in this restaurant, we did not interact with a single staff the entire time When we got there, we put the number of our party into a machine and it spit out a ticket with our table number. We were table 17 so we walked into the restaurant and found the table labelled 17. Once we got to table 17, there was an iPad at the table and we could scroll through all of the things and order them Just like at the last conveyor belt restaurant when you would choose something and click submit a couple minutes later, it would just zip over to you on the conveyor belt. This restaurant was slightly different in that. It also had a second conveyor belt that was just going by the table with different plates of sushi and you could also grab those and I’m not exactly sure what you would do with those to know to pay for them. Maybe you had to scan the QR code or something we weren’t quite sure so we didn’t take any off of that conveyor belt. There’s a second very fast conveyor belt on top and when we would order our food suddenly our iPad pad would flash: your salmon sushi is arriving!  At about five seconds later, our salmon sushi, which is zip on the conveyor belt in front of us and stop. And you could just order over and over and the sushi would just zip over to you again. it’s very fun. They also have a little shoot where you put your plates when you’re done and it just sucks them into the kitchen

You can see the little shoot for the plates On the right hand side of this picture beside the screen Every five plates that you put into this shoot, the screen would turn into a game and you’d see two little characters having a sumo wrestling match or some sort of battle, and if your character lost the battle, you won nothing, and if your character won the battle you’d win a prize

All of the food was delicious. We didn’t go quite as crazy as the last sushi restaurant because we had one more item to cross off of our food scavenger hunt right after this.

  

When we put our very last plate in, we got one more game and we finally won and it activated this giant gumball machine type thing that was above our table and spit out a giant plastic With this pin inside 😆 

On the way to the parfait restaurant, Trev finally found a guitar shop to browse

And then we arrived. This restaurant had over 100 different parfaits to choose from.  And honestly, I thought the prices were very reasonable. All of the parfaits we ordered were just under $10 Canadian and remember that that includes tax and tip since you don’t tip in Japan. So we walked out of there paying less than $50 for five parfaits and wait till you see them

One other thing about Japan is that they really almost never have napkins served with items. They always come with these little wet nap things.

Our waiter delivering our first three pars

Isn’t this hilarious Anna got a soft serve parfait and it was literally 2 feet high

Owen got a strawberry something or other parfait

Mine was a strawberry trifle parfait

Joel got a caramel brownie per

And I can’t remember what Travis’s was called some sort of caramel chocolate parfait

I thought there was no way we’re gonna be able to finish these, but honestly, we almost finished them completely I couldn’t believe Anna ate almost 2/3 of hers and then of course Trev polished it off

After that, we went to Don Quijote. Seems like we have to stop there about once a day The kids wanted to get some flavoured Kit Kats for their friends. And the kids also wanted to spend some of their souvenir money The main reason for the stop that was to get one of these compression bags to try to get Munchlax to be a bit smaller for a suitcase

Anna picked up his eyelash curler which is supposedly one of the best purchases you can get at Donki according to the viral TikTok Internet world

Owen got a Pokémon figure for his desk

  

Joel got these Demon slayer cards

Remi walked back to the hotel

Look at the state of Anna‘s brand new shoes. why we thought getting bright white shoes was a good idea I will never understand.  We have already washed them once in a washing machine this trip. This is the second wash. They came out a little cleaner than this, but still pretty much completely black. We will have to try some pretty significant OxiClean soaks when we get home. 

The compression bag did a pretty good job getting that stuffy down to a reasonable size to fitness suitcase!

Here is how we are doing on our food scavenger hunt with two days left to go. There are still nine items on the list. We know we will probably get four or five In Osaka tomorrow But I don’t think we are gonna get them all checked off. We are just out of time. We’ve definitely done our best and tried to have a wide variety of food while we’re here We’ve tried so many different things and have really mostly only had sushi and ramen more than once. One of our two days left is at Universal where we’re probably not going to get much traditional Japanese food so that’s a bit of a waste of day from a food perspective

And one more picture to document that while I’m doing my blog and videos, Trevor is always rating in our journal. We still like to have a physical journal of the trips and we do like to go back and read our old journals. Plus, Trevor is way funnier than me so the entries are much more entertaining

Despite the quieter day we still had 20,000 steps Off to Osaka tomorrow morning