11 Mar, Day 3: Get Lost!

Time to do some exploring! Needed something not too intellectually challenging for our jet-lagged selves, so we thought food was a good option. We knew there's a large indoor market so we checked that out. Felt a little on the stupid side, since I couldn't identify any of the roots and vegetables the vendors had for sale, but I did see some strawberries, so not a total failure here! The restaurant we were interested in-a little hole in the wall kind of establishment-were sold out for the day, so off we walked to the train station where we knew they have a whole floor of restaurants. We even found one that was open and I ordered the first sake of this trip. Lynda said:"Sake, now?" like I'm not on vacation or something. Or like I cared.

Indoor market


German bakery inside the train station, except none of that stuff was German. Lynda suggested telling people that they're being ripped off, but then wouldn't let me drink enough sake to make me want to do it.


Vegetable tempura curry


Restaurant

After the very good meal, we needed to fight some serious jet lag and set out for Kenroku-en Garden. I'll let the photos speak for themselves. And I'm too tired to type.











Historical tea house

We greatly enjoyed the peace and tranquility of the garden. Did you know selfie sticks are a must-have within the age groups of 1-99?

And then we got lost. We had a pretty good idea of where to go and were able to find the street until that street made a turn which wasn't on the map. So we wandered around, asked somebody, got lost again and wound up using our good senses; we were going to find the river (we saw some houses built on an embankment and figured there had to be a valley with a river) and from there we'd know where to go. Our good senses took us into one narrow street after another, with darkness settling in around us and us jumping out of the way of bicycle riders on kamikaze missions. Lynda suggested taking a taxi if we should get totally lost, except that the taxis were where the river was, aka not there.

We finally stumbled upon a bridge and were greatly relieved to see some signs pointing us in the right direction; we now didn't have to knock on some unsuspecting family's door to ask where we were. That would've been Plan B!