Acrobatics in Kyoto

Kyoto was really fun! I went to meet up with Tom, a friend of mine that I met in Japanese classes in Manchester who just happens to be living in Japan now, and his friend Joanna. I arrived a little late since the bus to the Philosophers path took a lot longer than I had expected.

So when I arrived, I found them taking tea with an energetic old Japanese man who turned out to be a very interesting man. He immediately welcomed me into his garden where there was a table set up and some beautiful photographs hanging on the wall which he'd taken. He served some delicious green tea and was very hospitable.

His hobby is to offer his garden as a rest place for passers by and to exchange language and meet people from all over the world. We signed his guest book and swapped information with him so that he could strike up a correspondence.

Although we could have sat and listened to him for hours, we had a walk ahead of us so we left to pursue our walk and visit the temples. Part of the purpose of the trip was to take some good pictures, since Tom and Jo both do acro (acrobatics to you and me), they were planning to take some interesting photos so I agreed to take photos for them and tag along for the day.

I took lots of photo's of our surroundings as we walked since Kyoto's leaves are starting to change. The first temple we walked to was really nice, it's called the silver palace. We walked from there, following the Philosopher's path and chatting to other walkers as we went, to the next and quite possibly most beautiful temple I've seen to date.

The grounds are huge and there were plenty of photo opportunities too.

We walked around the beautiful gardens and viewed the autumn special exhibit which had painted panels from the Edo period amongst other amazing artwork.

It wasn't long before Jo was convincing me to give acro a try and I thought, why not? The photo at the top of this post is what ensued! That was actually the first attempt too - it was really fun and I certainly got the bug to do more.

Before I left that day, they showed me a few more to try and we took some good pictures.

The days food exploits were great too! I ate a lot of fried food and tried Kushikatsu which is a type of fried food with a specific sauce. At that Izakaya we had a few sours which went down really well and even had the days fruit intake (alcohol soaked fruit counts, right?! 😏)

I had so much fun doing acro and hanging out with Tom and Jo that we decided to do it all again tomorrow. I finished work early and headed over to Kyoto for some more acro fun and an all you can eat steak meal.

Sadly we didn't get much time for acro practice since it took so long to find the 'park'. We just didn''t have any luck finding a green space and eventually made do with the space we found.

I had so much fun and didn't want to leave but we had a steak dinner reservation calling. The restaurant was a tabehodai type place, which means you pay a flat fee and then can order as much food as you like within the time period. We had two hours of all you can eat and drink during which time I ate so much that I was surprised I could move! Tom did a stellar job as our chef for the evening, which was a good thing since I kept forgetting to check the food. That might have had something to do with the all you can drink part. 😵

I didn't want to leave and hanging out with Jo and Tom had put me in holiday mode but I had to get the train home since I had to work the next day. I had so much fun that I vowed to train every day so that when I meet with them again, we can work on more acro things. I have been training every day to achieve a handstand but going from not exercising at all has made this a slow process.

Before I left, they set me up with an Instagram account - so if you want to see my photos pretty much as I take them (since I'm now very behind on this blog!!!), then please follow me: JoeleyinJapan.