Hey guys. Happy Easter, happy birthday to my mum and happy national ramen day. What a Sunday, hey.

As you might be able to infer from the elusive title of this blog post, I took my third trip to Kansai this week. It is with a heavy heart that I say it was also my final trip. I will be leaving Japan in the summer so I went to do all my favourite things that the prefecture has to offer one final time.

After a long day of work on Wednesday, I took the night bus to Kyoto, arriving in darkness at five o’clock on Thursday morning. I lugged my weary self and backpack to Fushimi-Inari Shrine where I arrived as day was breaking at quarter to six in the morning. The last time I visited the shrine, which is dedicated to the Shinto god of rice, it was a rainy March morning. This time as I hiked my way up to the summit of Mount Inari, I was greeted by breathtaking views of Kyoto as I went.

I spent the rest of my Thursday walking and bussing my way around Kyoto. I also listened to Phoebe Bridgers’ song Kyoto on loop as I did so. At some point my phone ran out of battery so I just started singing it out loud as I walked instead. I really recommend it as background music whilst you read this blog post. It’s a great song. I spent the day slurping soba noodles in Arashiyama, visiting temples, soaking with some locals at the public bath and taking Insta-worthy cherry blossom snaps. All in all, a good day.

I stayed in Gojo Guesthouse, which is a hostel/cafe/exhibition space very close to the famous Kiyomizudera temple. I booked a three bedroom dorm, which I had all to myself. I slept in a futon in a big tatami room with sliding wood-panelled doors. Having hardly slept and been on my feet all day, I slept incredibly well that first night.

On Friday, I headed to Uji, a nearby town famous for its matcha and ten-yen-coin temple. For avid Japannabel readers, you might remember my trip with Akira last July. The weather was a bit crap then whereas Friday was an absolute scorcher in Uji. For breakfast I ate matcha parfait at Nakamura Tokichi, which is where and what I ate last time too.

Japanese parfait is kind of like a mini-trifle but it’s way better because there are no soggy sponge fingers. Underneath the thin layer of matcha-flavoured sponge, I found ice cream, mochi, strawberries, matcha rice krispies; all neatly parcelled in and not contaminating each other with their individual flavours.

After a brief visit to Byodo-In temple, I headed for the river bank. I crossed Asagiri Bridge so I could sit in the sun. Fifteen or so oldies sat in a group nearby, talking loudly, laughing and pouring each other tiny cups of sake out of a tall, brown, glass bottle. One of them was wearing sunglasses and a short-sleeved shirt buttoned right up to the top. His name was Kazuo. I know this because he told me when he walked over with the bottle and a spare paper cup, which he filled and passed to me.

“Arigatou gozaimasu,” I said. He turned back to his friends, shouting, “Nihongo jouzu.” (Her Japanese is great.)

He asked me where I was from and I said, “Igirisu kara kimashita.” We worked our way through the usual conversation, the only one I know how to have in Japanese. Age, job, location, marital status, when I arrived in Japan, when I plan on leaving. It’s always the same, lots of smiling and lots of nodding. He marvelled at my Japanese and, if I’m honest, I did a little bit too.

He gave me a small rice cracker with a blob of something that was supposed to be cheese and a whole almond on it. He listed all the places he had ever visited outside of Japan. Detroit, Washington, Taiwan, Indonesia, Italy, Spain. I interrupted him when he said Spain and I told him I used to live there.

“Madrid?” he asked.

“Hai,” I said.

He nodded and then it appeared we’d run out of conversation topics. He eventually went back to his friends and I lay in the sun for a while longer. I walked past them as I left and fifteen wrinkled, smiling faces waved goodbye and shouted, “Matane,” to me in unison.

I ate some matcha-flavoured dumplings before I took the train to Nara. Last summer, I went to an Italian restaurant in Nara called Nino. It was and still is the best restaurant I’ve been to in Japan. The service is incredible. Nino is kind and friendly and speaks no English but talks through a small translating device and wildly interesting hand gestures. I was sitting between two men, one who spoke with an accent that was somewhere between Japanese and very posh American. He had been an exchange student at Stanford for two years, which must have been the cause of the hybrid accent. I told him he spoke English very well. He smiled at me, nodded slowly and said, “I think so.”

He annoyed me slightly as the night progressed with comments such as, “I am an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Boris Johnson,” and “Mr. Farage is a highly impressive man.”

Anyway here’s a picture of the gang. From left to right, we’ve got Farage’s mate, the waitress (who I didn’t speak to directly but was very smiley and nice), Mayumi (second in command), the customer on my left who comes every Friday night, and finally Nino.

I didn’t get back to Kyoto until almost ten p.m. I was tempted to go back to my futon and tatami and sleep until morning, but I’d been invited to an exhibition by a photo-graphics artist in the hostel cafe the day before. He told me he was having ‘a little ad-lib experiment with some musicians at the show’ until midnight and I’d said I would swing by. The address on the flyer didn’t come up on Google Maps and I felt a little apprehensive as I walked the dark Kyoto streets, looking for this bar. Eventually I came across a semi-lifted garage door with light spilling out of it and a man smoking a cigarette outside.

“Is this Milko Gallery?” I asked. He nodded. I bent under the door and entered a tiny, smoke-filled room with art all over the walls. The photo-graphics artist welcomed me inside and someone gave me their seat. Initially I was concerned this was far too cool an event for me to attend, but I had a great time. At some point, the conversation moved onto David Bowie and someone said they’d seen a poster for a Bowie photography exhibition in Kyoto. I asked if the photographer was Masayoshi Sukita, a famous music photographer whose work is sold in galleries around the world, one of which happens to be Snap Galleries, Leamington Spa. Sure enough, the exhibition was called Bowie/Kyoto/Sukita and it just so happened to be starting tomorrow, on my final day in Kyoto.

I went to the exhibition at eleven o’clock the following morning. The photos were beautiful. Some I recognised from my gallery assistant days in Leamington Spa but many were snaps of Bowie in and around Kyoto that I had never seen before. I walked around the exhibition a couple of times, wondering if Sukita was there and whether or not I should say hello.

I sheepishly approached a gallery employee and said, “Sukita-san wa koko desu ka?” (Is Sukita-san here?)

“Sukita-sensei?” she asked back sternly.

“Yes, sorry, Sukita-sensei. Is he here?”

She looked hesitant to tell me and I tried to explain in broken Japanese that he was a friend of my parents. Eventually she told me to wait and she disappeared out of the entrance. I was beckoned over a few minutes later, where I met Sukita’s nephew, Aki. I explained that I was Guy and Jane’s daughter and he was very happy and surprised to see me. A woman standing next to Aki told me she recognised me from 2013, when I had been handing out flyers for the exhibition in London. Sukita-sensei came out of the back office and we all chatted in a group for a few minutes before other people started to talk to him and request photos. It was a great exhibition and I am so glad that I went.

I spent my final afternoon in Kobe. There was some kind of market with music and food stalls, where I bought kobe beef over rice and a beer for my lunch.

Next I went to Minato no Mori Park and sat under the cherry blossom, people-watching. Trains looped around the edge of the park on raised tracks somewhere between the grass and the sky. There was a woman in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt playing tennis with a man on the grass as a child in the same t-shirt cycled in figures of eight around them. A tiny chocolate poodle in a pink body warmer ran around the trees. She disturbed a man and his chihuahua mid-photoshoot and the chihuahua did not look impressed. The poodle barged into a young couple’s picnic and then an older couple’s barbecue, all the while her owner manically ran behind her.

As afternoon turned to evening, I took the train to Osaka where I ate okonomiyaki for dinner (as pictured above) before I boarded the night bus back to Tokyo. I got off the bus at five thirty this morning and I plan to spend Easter Sunday in bed eating chocolate and maybe celebrating national ramen day with a bowl of tonkotsu later on.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a happy Easter, a happy national ramen day, and a happy birthday depending on who and where you are.