Deja Vu on 12th April

Today reminded me of two days in Japan--the first and last days of my visit to Kyoto in September, on my way out of the country.

On the first day, I travelled an hour by train to Osaka in order to pick up some lost property. The previous day I had left a plastic bag containing my favourite black shawl and some Sakamoto Ryouma socks on the JR bus from Kochi. I had called JR up and managed to explain what I was looking for and where I had left it; they instructed me to visit the office at Osaka station the following day. When I arrived, however, my bag wasn't there; it had accidentally gone to Okayama. Thinking back now, perhaps the lost property staff were just curious to meet this shawl-and-historical-figure-sock-losing foreigner? In any case, I spent the morning going to Osaka, walking around the station for a while, and then going back to Kyoto, and that's why today reminds me of it. I left my hostel at 10AM checkout, dropped my backpack off in a storage locker at a downtown train station, and then, realizing that I had left my (new, pink!) umbrella in the hostel, went back to get it. Rather shorter than Kyoto to Osaka, and more successful, too.

On the last day in Kyoto, in spite of heavy rain I decided to go to a forested area in the north of the city. I arrived there, lightly damp, and got my feet totally soaked walking only a little ways into the forest. I glimpsed the big red tori gate of the temple in the forest, my actual goal. But the muddiness of the ground between me and the gate, and the fact that it was still raining and I wouldn't be able to take my camera out at all, lead me to give up at this point and take the next bus back to my hostel. I wanted to get to Tokyo by evening, and I didn't have much energy or enough time to do anything really good--and besides, it was raining--so I ended up heading straight to the shinkansen. It was a bit like that today. Because of my 6pm flight back to Sydney (which I will be boarding in not too long) I couldn't really do anything much, and a serious case of New Shoes Syndrome discouraged me from climing up to the Mount Coot-Tha lookout, so I spent the mid-day floating around the city on ferries and reading in parks, and then caught an earlier-than-necessary train to the airport.

I always feel bad when I waste time like this while travelling, but I guess it can't be helped.