Rui's Visit

Saturday
We headed to Harbourland for some shopping. Had lunch at The Old Spaghetti Factory - very tasty! Then headed to Sannomiya for some more shopping. Unfortunately we didn't buy very much. We stayed in Sanners till the evening and had dinner at an izakaya which was crap - my first bad experience with food in Japan! The servings didn't match the pictures at all and the food wasn't all that good.

We dropped by Suma on the way home to see if the Suma Beach Party was still going on but it finished at 9pm. We bought some Haagen Dazs Parfait packs and headed home. Tried out our new Dead Sea mud masks from the World Expo and just chatted while flipping through our Japanese magazines.

Sunday
I can't remember much but it was stinking hot! Breakfast was the Haagen Dazs Parfaits as we walked to the train station. I had the Japanese Classic and Rui had the Caramel Macchiato.
We headed to Kyoto for the famous Gion Matsuri. We got there quite late and missed the main parade but we were kinda thankful we did. It was packed as! Super crowded and super hot and humid! eeks! We ended up following one procession down the main road to Yasaka Shrine but then stopped into Zara for their sale haha talk about getting cultured. We ended up spending an hour and a half there (in the lovely airconditioning) and picked up 5 items each for bargain prices - Score! We felt a lot better after yesterday's poor shopping results.

Then we braved the crowds and heat again and went into Yasaka Shrine where they had another parade. We got to see the boy on the horse circle a shrine thing which housed 3 gold, wooden floats but we were just too hot to stand around so we exited the back and ran into a procession of white clad, butt cheek showing men who clapped and shouted while a few danced around holding a golden arch thing. After clapping, cheering and taking photos of nice butt cheeks (some of the yakuza tatoos were amazing!) we headed back Kyoto station.

We got cleaned up (those refresher wipes and powder sheets are so good), changed and headed into Osaka for Mari's birthday. Mari had a joint party with Hiromi and Nami at Funky Train. Pretty nice place with all you can eat and drink. It was good to see some familiar faces and catch up with Warren, Mel, Marcia, Chie and Noel. Not wanting to pull an all nighter, Rui and I headed home to catch the last train.

So tiring but good times.
Highlights:
Pretty fly whiteboy. Rui - you know you liked it! haha
The confused look on Rui's face when I gave the seedy man behind her the finger for unashamedly looking us up and down. She was mid-conversation and was like "What the? Why are you giving me the finger?" and the guy still kept on looking! Mental note - must work on evil glare.