Day 18

Today was a long but fun day!  Our feet are definitely tired after all the exploring we did, haha.  In the morning we did more boring laundry, so I won't post pictures of that ;)  But after that we headed out to see the Fushimi Inari Shrine.  Along the way we ended up in a shopping mall and got to try the Mcdonald's shrimp burger!  We had heard about this in America, but never gotten a chance to try.  It was pretty good, and had special big mac sauce on it.

A short train ride later we arrived at the shrine!  The main attraction here is the thousand tori gates that lead up the mountain, but the shrine itself is gorgeous too.  Inari is a Japanese goddess associated with foxes, so they were everywhere around the shrine.  We took a selfie with one of the foxes, the statues were really cool.

(fun fact: foxes favorite food is fried tofu!)

After seeing the main shrine, we started our hike up the mountain.  The gates are just packed together at the beginning, creating tunnels of red to walk through.  Going up through them was wonderful, with a calm atmosphere and fresh mountain air.  We were lucky enough to beat most of the school groups, so it wasn't super packed yet.

Along the way, I also filled out a little fox charm for good luck.  For around $5 you can take a little fox token and write your name and a wish.  Then you tie it up on the shrine.  There were tons of really cool faces drawn on the charms already there, so I gave mine a little derp face~

After doodling around at the shrine and the nearby gift shops (more souvenirs, wooh!) we headed back out.  With no real plan in mind, we misread our map and decided to take the subway out to a park and then walk home.  What the map failed to tell us is how ridiculously far it was!  The nice thing was that along the way we got to see the Kyoto manga museum, which was a lot of fun.  We also finally made it to the river we had planned to get to, but by then we were exhausted.  A few more train rides later and we got back back near our hotel for dinner.

The pizza was four cheese with honey you could drizzle on it to enhance the flavor.  Mom and dad liked it, that's for sure!