Summary
Friday, 21 March was a travel day for us, to Kyoto from Fukui in the mid-morning.
Relatively early on the morning of Friday, 21 March, we traveled to Kyoto from Fukui. We took the new Hokiriku Shinkansen to Tsuruga, and then did this crazy run to catch the onward-bound Thunderbird Limited Express. I think some additional thinking should have been carried out on this transfer point! The Hokiriku Shinkansen will not connect Tsuruga and Kyoto directly until perhaps 2045, but there are certainly signs of construction all along the way.
After two hours on the train, we found our way to our hotel, the Travelodge Kyoto Shijo Kawaramachi, right in the thick of things in the tourist area near the Nishiki Market. Nice, new (2023) hotel in the current style, with a good breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Close to shopping, many restaurants, many tourist sites and…many tourists. Packed. To the gills! From everywhere! Chinese, Koreans, Italians, Brits, Indonesians…no wonder many Japanese feel overrun by tourists, although I think the Japanese economy and government appreciate the something like 55 billion dollars that tourists spent.
Indeed, what I found shocking were
the late night activities. Not only did people audibly roar all night long around on motorcycles, in fancy cars (I was in the back of a well-built hotel and could hear everything pretty clearly), and so on, I was shocked how many wildly inebriated people I found when I went for a walk around 4am. I mean, blackout drunk, or staggering around, especially Koreans and Chinese, men and women. Yes, the Japanese like their booze as much as anyone but I was kind of shocked.
Anyway, the students rested and I headed off to two important meetings: first, a tasty ramen lunch at the renowned Ippudo with Bucknell history major Amanda Cullen and friend Ian Marsh who are studying for a semester in the Temple University program in Tokyo and came down for a quick visit and later, for coffee, with East Asian Studies major Ella Uriu, who is studying for the year through the Associated Kyoto Program (AKP) at Doshisha University. All are class of 2026.
So nice to see them and learn about their study abroad experiences and experiences with Japan!
After that, I felt really tired and fell to sleep soon after getting back to the hotel! I think that the students were pretty tired, too.
With best wishes, David
