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Woke up again in the tiniest room I have ever stayed in….not by myself but with another person. Making matters worse I had been too tired to pack up the night before, (breaking one of my own golden travel rules) I decided to just sit on the bed and let Darren get ready and packed before I did the same so we didn't get in each other's way. We checked out of the hotel and stored our stuff, I'm afraid neither us of were disappointed to see the back of the APA Higobashi Hotel.
We had breakfast in the Seattle Coffee shop under the hotel, Darren had a hot chocolate and a croissant and I had a caramel latte and a sandwich, before jumping on the metro to Osaka Castle. We got the train in the opposite direction and changed over to the Chuo green line from the blue line at Hommachi. I realised that the green line intersected with the red line here, meaning that later we could go all the way to Shin-Osaka to get back on the bullet train, therefore bypassing Umeda Station which is like a maze and has signs that make no sense.
We arrived at the castle which was white with a green roof and gold trimmings. We walked up to it, but elected not to go inside, as the last castle was just a museum inside and we had both had just about enough stairs to last a life time. On the way up there were lots of trees and one cherry blossom even had one flower that was still holding on for dear life.
The castle had kind of a little medieval faire going on around it with shops and displays of all sorts. Darren and I even had a go at archery. Darren managed to get all the arrows around the target, I actually managed to hit it. I bought a lovely folding painting of a lion and a cheetah in the Japanese style and then we walked back to the station to go to the Umeda floating sky garden. This was quite a hike from where we were and meant we had to go through confusing Umeda station again. It actually wasn't as difficult to find as the Ferris wheel.
The tower, which is actually two towers with a big circular walkway and diagonal escalators joining them is completely plated in mirrored glass and has a Chinese restaurant at the top, which didn't look too expensive so we had lunch there. It was an awesome lunch, however we forgot to take into account the 10% consumption tax (not unlike the "capperto" in Italy) that you pay for sitting and eating in a nice restaurant and were left a bit miffed when the bill came to 8510 yen. (About $81.00) Darren was especially unimpressed, I think he will be calling it the eighty dollar lunch for the rest of his life.
After lunch we went up to the sky garden, which was unbelievably cold, so I didn't last long, the view was amazing and we were actually looking down on the giant Ferris wheel that we had been on last night. After the tower it was time to negotiate the confusing station one more time (I'd basically gotten the hang of it by now anyway) and go back to the hotel to collect our bags and set off for Kyoto.
We collected our luggage and went back into the metro and changed onto the red line from Hommachi station, although it wasn't at all confusing it was still a long walk with all our stuff and my feet were really start to let me down. The train lines here are very similar to Moscow, different lines on different levels, and changing trains actually means changing stations, as the stations aren't built like a layer cake, the change overs are next to each other rather that above or below, like the London Tube. We managed to board the metro bound for Shin Osaka, and it was PACKED! No chance of sitting down and it was five stops away, my feet were actually hurting me so much I was nearly crying. This is what having a stupid office job for six months does to someone who used to walk around cities for a living!
We finally arrived at Shin Osaka station and got seat reservations for the bullet train to Kyoto, another Hikari and window seats for all of the twenty five minutes it took to get there. I didn't care at least I got to sit down. We arrived into Kyoto station after our brief ride on the bullet train and got a cab to our hotel. I think the driver must have thought we were really lazy as it was literally two minutes away and I think he did try to tell us that, but of course we couldn't understand and he took us anyway. We were too tired by this time to try and figure it out, it was such a short distance comparatively, but I think we were both just done. We checked in to the hotel and apart from a quick trip to "Family Mart" another Japanese version of 7/11, did nothing else for the rest of the evening. We were still full from "eighty dollar lunch."
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Mum Sounds like our hotel in Singapore, we had to pack one at a time because the room was so small.